MANAGEMENT BY EXPERIENCE

I have to be honest, I have a drill Sargent personality. I wasn’t all that aware of it since the kids have grown up and gone off on their own until recently when my granddaughter began to salute as she was hurrying out to the car to get in and accompany me on an errand. In my head I said “darn, it is still there”.

At work, a continual annoyance of little things bothered me and I found myself repeating bad words in my head, words my mother didn’t allow said in the house when I was a little girl.

After a few actions from employees that were no-nos in the handbook such as wearing part of our service uniform, shirt but forgetting the pants or wearing the pants and not the company logoed shirt I knew I had to address the issues. But even when I was seeing the small hiccups I didn’t want to rock the boat and draw attention.

I found myself wondering how can a drill Sargent personality such as mine not want rules to be followed? I dislike confrontation when it involves my work and professional life but as far as giving orders to family members I know and love no problem.

I wanted to get this under control, the actions of a few employees, and the best way to address it in a workable way. This was a learning and implementing step for me. I read a bunch of positive books on professional management and then took my husband’s advice and tossed most and came up with my own version of committed management. Here is what it looks like today.

I want everyone on staff to have the freedom to make decisions based on experience and knowledge and common sense. I also trust that every one of us has a comfortable and friendly relationship with the people we work with.

To put my words into action I schedule myself to lead a few training sessions and talk about the specifics of management and how interaction among ourselves plays out in the workplace.

Put another way, during these sessions I talk about the little things we do, why uniforms, critical conversations, body language, tone of voice, and I ask questions and ask more questions and then I listen. My greatest understandings as a business owner have been during these training sessions which always close with questions, responses, inquiries, and decisions made.

As far as Sargent behavior? Haven’t seen it show up for a long time, which leads me to believe it has retired with no benefits.