Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with supervising

When your best actually isn’t good enough: What could a supervisor do to help you if you were under-performing at work?

Anonymous — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:23:08 -0800

When your best actually isn’t good enough: What could a supervisor do to help you if you were under-performing at work? Hi everyone: Posting anonymously because a lot of my fellow staff love metafilter (and rightly so!). Also, sorry for the length - just want to be sure I get all of the details since I can't post followups anon-style.

I'm wondering how best to help a person I supervise. I work in a service industry, where there is a ‘high-touch’ approach to working with clients. I supervise a team who are expected to respond like concierges – to be discreetly responsive to all requests and client preferences, and to be tactful when the request is unreasonable. In short, to give the customer an excellent experience. My difficulty is that this approach doesn’t come naturally to one of the people I manage. And HR balks at firing staff.

Though this staff person and I have regularly discussed the ‘providing good client service’ issue, somehow something is often a bit off in their approach. For example, if a client is unhappy with our service, the next time my goal will be to be particularly responsive in the short and long term. Short term: to apologize, to offer to correct the problem, to tell them a date that the problem will be corrected and to meet that deadline. Long term: to note that the client was previously unhappy with our service, so the next time they use us to be extra responsive – no missed deadlines, no mistakes. In short, the client needs to feel taken care of and trust us.

My staff person has trouble doing that consistently. If they know they’re going to miss a deadline they may or may not let the client know. They don’t tend to commit to being extra responsive this time if they’ve ticked a client off in the past. (This could be something like: If we’ve missed getting them their product on time last time, that this time we’ll send them weekly updates until they tell us the product has arrived). Also, if they feel a client or team member has wrongly criticized them (and maybe they did), this person will say how angry they are, and that they don’t know how they’ll keep their cool in dealing with the client or team member in the future (which ends up making them look unprofessional, no matter how much of an ass the client/staff person was).

The thing is, while there can be guidelines and rules, I think it’s really hard to comprehensively teach professional interpersonal skills. I didn’t appreciate how lucky I’d been in hiring staff in the past. Everyone else already came to the job with these professional interpersonal skills, and our guidelines were just parameters - they weren’t lessons on what to do to make a client feel cared for. Also, it’s hard to model professional behavior in this case, because no one else on the team does the same tasks as this person. So the person may see another staff member behave professionally, but doesn’t always apply the principles they saw to their own work.

This situation is hard for this person – both because they need the job, say they like the work, and because they got consistent positive feedback at their previous client services position. We’ve talked about this regularly and I give consistent positive and constructive feedback. But it feels like it's backfiring and bashing their self esteem, as we just seem to be going over the same themes, even though I know they are trying hard. I can’t fire them because their mistakes aren’t egregious, and overall, when they try their hardest and do their best, they are doing solid “B” work. When they don’t, it’s a passible “C”. It’s just rarely an “A”.
I find myself taking a lot of time putting out small fires, and doing lots of small soothing when clients are not pleased with this person’s performance.

I realize part of the problem is the previous person in the job was amazing – customers loved her, she’d remember small details about their preferences, she was reliable, etc. She could handle the heavy, difficult workload with professional grace. I also think some clients and staff don’t see or appreciate the 100 things this person does well, and tend to notice the 15 ‘not good client service moments’. But I also appreciate that staff/clients are annoyed that when the current person messes up or doesn’t get that they should make the extra follow up phone call, etc., the person will often point to the huge workload as the reason why they couldn’t give the A+ service.

So the question: What could your supervisor do to help you if you were the person in that situation? What would help you do a better job or make you feel supported? Are concierge-like positions just something that some people sort of get in theory, but aren't really skilled at? And that's just the way it goes?

How can I sharpen my conflict resolution skills?

self — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 17:06:34 -0800

Conflict resolution-filter: How can I be a better (read: appropriately responsive and fair) moderator and listener? A lot more inside. I am a shift supervisor at a large coffee shop. First, let me make a few things about my title clear:

-I cannot fire anyone.
-I can't always send people home, if it's a busy day
-I do not make the schedule
-It is imperative that I don't (I can't even seem to) play favorites
-I have a load of responsibility to the store, as I am an active manager when there, and this whole post is only about part of the things I have to deal with.

However, the following dilemma can ruin an entire day, trickle down through morale, and ultimate affect the entire operation of the store. This is why I'm posting. Okay, here 'goes....

My job requires me to manage coworkers who deal with the same issues I do. A lot of the time, because we're in the customer service and retail industry and rely on each other to make work easier and more efficient, those issues often pertain to problems between coworkers.

When a dispute breaks out between two or more of them, they will typically come to me individually and gripe about the one another. It is my responsibility to listen to these concerns (no matter how trivial they can be), and try to effectively quell the tide of hysteria or complaining to resolution.

If I can't solve the problem, I at least need to deal with it to the point where work can continue unabated until the manager has the time to address it themselves.

This is just one aspect of my roll at the store, and I by no means have the leisure to sharpen that one skill. I'm often in the very same boat as these coworkers, working along side them. Besides having to be there for my coworkers, I am always dealing with the customers' needs, my superiors' requests, and anything else that might crop up (See top where I explain that I am effectively an active manager when I'm on the clock).

So I turn to AskMe for this one. I need to make sure my coworkers are feeling like they are being heard, that their concerns or complaints are being addressed, and that they can always talk to me. I often find myself feeling weird sympathizing with both sides of an argument (I almost feel superficial), and am tired of just feeling like a nodding head on a stick. I realize that that's the basic want of someone who is venting, but there's definitely more.

What advise can you, the great hive mind, give me about conflict resolution? What do you like to hear or see from someone you are going to to have your issues dealt with? What does this role of mine dictate in these often delicate situations? And how can I feel less boss-like and more confidant-ish?

I realize there are a multitude of books on the subject, but I often find them containing bland language or (to me) over-analytic fallacies. I'm dealing with people, not first-initial-last-names on a roster. And I'm one of those people.

In essence, help me help you*!

*as in the people

How to tell a new employee her clothes are too sloppy?

mygothlaundry — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 11:36:30 -0800

How do I gently inform a new employee that she needs to dress better? We recently hired a new part time person for our (very) small staff. She's wonderful; we love her; she's already great - work-wise. Appearance-wise, however, she leaves something to be desired. She's sloppy; her clothes don't fit well or match and they're just inappropriate for her position, which is very much in the public eye. She's also in her mid thirties, so you would think that she would know dressing like a college student is no longer appropriate. Her clothing style is what we here in Asheville call "crunchy" btw: messed up old Ugg boots, corduroy jeans that don't fit, a not quite clean shirt that clashes horribly with the much too small cardigan over it, striped kneesocks with a plaid skirt and so on. We do have a dress code but it doesn't cover this kind of thing: it just says no jeans & no logo T-shirts & please be neat.

She doesn't have to get all corporated out - noone expects her to wear a suit every day or anything - but she should look like an adult, have clothes that are basically business to business casual and are clean, match and fit. This whole thing is hard for me because I certainly don't dress like a corporate clone: I mostly just wear black and try to make sure that everything looks at least kind of "officey." So I have no idea how to approach this entire conversation and, as I hate confronting people for anything at all, much less something personal like this, I am turning to the hive mind.