Ask a Manager: How to Navigate Clueless Colleagues, Lunch-Stealing Bosses, and the Rest of Your Life at Work

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I am the newest middle manager at my institution, and in the past, all manager-level staff have been required to attend the county’s leadership training, which consists of a full-day workshop once a month for nine months. It costs my institution a fair amount of money to send people to this training, and now it is my turn. The most common stuff is: ‘I have a terrible boss, what do I do? I want my co-worker to stop doing this annoying thing but I don’t want to say anything to them about it, is there a magic pill?’ Those haven’t changed and probably will never change. There is stuff that changed around the edges. A year after I started we plunged into a recession, and that had a huge impact on the job market, and so the nature of the questions that I was getting for a few years was upsetting and stressful, really. There were people who had been out of work for years,” she says.

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I can admit that I did not do my best on the first interview. Part of it was that the person I was talking to was not enthusiastic from the very start. I kind of feed off energy and it’s hard to be excited when the person on the other end sounds bored. Part of it was that I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been. FWIW, while I don’t think Dale did anything wrong – apart perhaps from using clumsy wording, which is normal at this level – and I agree that you overreacted, I completely understand your frustration. There’s also my book, Managing to Change the World: The Nonprofit Manager’s Guide to Getting Results. While it’s targeted toward nonprofit managers, about 98% of it applies across sectors. Ask a Manager: How to Navigate Clueless Colleagues, Lunch-Stealing Bosses, and the Rest of Your Life at WorkOP3 (tasks for interns) – sounds like you are doing quite a lot in terms of “supervising” this group – creating areas of responsibility for them etc. How did this situation come to be? Were you tasked with this or has the situation just developed this way? I don’t think it is just because OP is senior to them, because surely pretty much anyone is “senior” to an intern in that respect. I have about 20 direct reports, all of whom do complex, niche work for very demanding customers. Simply supporting them and their day-to-day work is a full time job. Yet I’m also responsible for projects that span multiple groups (think dotted line relationships), our interactions with customers and leadership, and high level organizational goals. I am, by all accounts, considered an exceptional manager. Many staff had said I’m the best manager they’ve ever had. Leadership and our partners give me and my team high praise. I’m sought out for advice as both an SME and someone with a high EQ. But I’m incredibly overworked, constantly burned out, and not nearly as well compensated as I should be. Requests for additional support, reduction of direct reports/projects, etc. are met with hand-waving about budgets and advice to “not beat yourself up if things are not perfect”. The subtext there is “don’t worry if you don’t support the people, just get the work done”. I am not alone in this. My experience is the experience of almost everyone who manages in my organization from Team Leads to Directors of divisions.

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This saves time and you get to learn more in less time. Bookmark this project management blog to keep learning about the practical side of the project management industry through real life accounts. 18. Musings on Project ManagementI’d sure as hell want to know if a rep whose company I was considering doing business with behaved like that, and if I were Gertrude’s manager, I’d expect her to tell me … and if she didn’t and we hired this guy’s firm and then I found out about it later, I’d question her judgment in not telling me. It was a business dinner, and this is business-relevant information. She should tell her manager what happened — not framed as “obviously we will never speak to these people again” but as “I thought I should share this with you.”

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In my experience managers are not given anywhere near the time, resources, or leeway required to manage well. If they get even 50% of Alison’s advice right they are probably in the top 10% of all managers and are seen as wildly successful. If you are looking for expert tips and advice on project management, work culture, and team productivity ProofHub Buzz is the perfect place. The blog features content from the duo of Vartika Kashyap, who has been featured multiple times in LinkedIn Top Voices, and Sandeep Kashyap, the founder, and CEO of ProofHub – a leading project management and team collaboration software. The blog covers topics that revolve around Leadership, Productivity, Management, Work Culture, Team Building, Motivation, Self-Improvement, and Workplace challenges. 32. Sciforma

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We would term it as one of the best project management blogs that will come your way as it offers you enough resources to broaden your knowledge on project management in general, Agile practices, leadership, Six Sigma and digital know-how to for effectively planning and delivering projects. As for how to handle it now: if your coworkers are at all decent people, their thoughts are probably mainly “Oh no, poor Jane, I hope she is okay, that was clearly awful for her” and not “wow, Jane is prone to hysteria and now I will have to worry that anything could set her off.” That’s especially true if they’ve worked with you a while; their experience with you will tell them that this was an aberration, not a thing that should now define you. A light bulb suddenly went off in my brain as to what was going on – and it turned out I was correct. When I had slammed my hands on my computer in frustration earlier, three things had happened that I didn’t realize or intend: