By Steve M. Cohen bio
Many employees at all levels are guilty of taking their positions for granted. As a manager, it’s something you should be on the look out for, even in your own work. Even in a healthy job market, the attitude can be costly.
I was once involved in a case with an employee who had an $80,000 a year position. The individual had been employed for three years by a client organization. Despite his salary and responsibility, he arrived late for work an average of two times per week!
After five or six months of observing this tardy behavior, the manager was understandably angry. He hadn’t said anything to this employee, but he was reaching a boiling point. The manager asked me to counsel this employee because he thought that if he did it himself, he would end up terminating the person, which he did not wish to do. When he was at work, the employee did good, even excellent work.
You might accuse this manager of being avoidance oriented, confrontation averse or just plain wimpy. You might be right. I also believe that there can be significant value in having an outside person address these matters. I’m a consultant who manages messes for my clients, so I am obviously biased.
But I’ve also learned that the less personal counseling like this is, the better it usually is. If the manager conducts the counseling directly, there is a greater tendency for overreaction and a greater the probability for lingering animosity, both ways. Taking a hands-off approach is not a bad idea when the situation has reached a level where emotions are apt to become involved, even dominant.
I met with the employee and asked him to explain his habitual tardiness. He told me that his wife had a job and needed to be at work on time. She also drove a car that was undependable. Regularly, he was called upon to take her to work, which caused him to be late. He told me that since he did not have a fixed and firm start time, he could take the liberty of driving his wife to work as needed.
I asked him why he thought he did not have a firm starting time for his job. He gave me an incredulous look and said the manager had never told him that he had a specific time for reporting to work. I quickly corrected that error and told him that his work ethic and his presumption were putting his job at risk. He had no idea!
There are several lessons we might take from this. Both the employee and the manager were probably at fault here, at least to some degree. The employee clearly had assumed something he should not have and might have been a little clueless about office hours and basic expectations for his job. The manager may have failed to provide the worker a good orientation when the employee was first hired. Formally identifying those kinds of expectations are basic to the on-boarding process. This worker was not part of the “regular” staff so the misunderstanding was somewhat plausible, but that’s why formal orientation is important.
Indeed, the worker might have had a case had he been terminated.
