r/managers

I’m a new manager (26F) and I’m really struggling with how to be a respected leader without coming across as a either a bitch or a whippersnapper. The employee I manage is significantly older than me (45M) and has more experience/education than me.

In our 1-1s, he talks way too much, to the point where I can’t even get a word in. He will ramble on for 20-30 minutes straight without giving me the opportunity to ask questions or make comments on his work. I try to interrupt him to ask questions, but oftentimes he keeps talking over me when I try to butt in. I don’t know how to diplomatically say “hey, stop talking so much and give me the chance to speak!”

I fear that the age gap is causing a weird dynamic between my employee and I. To make matters worse, before he was my employee, we were colleagues working on the same team and our work relationship was completely different (much more laid back), so now to change this work relationship overnight to manager & employee makes it a little weird to me.

I want to be more respected and be a more effective leader, but I also worry about coming across as a bitch or coming across too “bossy” considering my young age. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!!

Typing on phone, not English native.

This kid, fresh out of college joined just over a year ago about 6 months after i was promoted into management, and let me tell you he's a nightmare to work with. Everyone and i really do mean everyone in the team hates him, like actual hate, he's rude, arrogant and just generally unpleasant to work with, and worst of all, he completely ignores and shits all over policy, doesn't follow dress code and will show up in clothes looking like he was out clubbing and came in to work without going home (which does actually happen from time to time), half the week he'll just log in from home and work from there despite RTO policy having started around the time he got hired and the other half when he actually comes into the office he's late every time, he'll skip meetings or worse, be playing games on his phone during meetings that he attends.

And the main problem about all of this, is that he is by far the best performer on the team, this kid is a genius, like actual genius, we have senior staff asking him for help and reviews, he's by far the best engineer on the team, so he sort of became untouchable, upper management doesn't care as long as he delivers and despite his attitude the team is better with him than without him, even with everyone's individual performance being worse with him around, his deliverables alone make the team perform better with than without him.

It's infuriating because it feels like company policy only applies to us simpletons and geniuses like him can trample all over us without consequence.

Now my boss overruled me to give this kid a promotion i was going to give to my best direct report, this guy has been working his ass off for this promotion and he knew it was coming, but now i have to explain to him that "actually the new kid you hate got it over you despite being here for 1/3 of your time and shitting all over company policy and team culture"

sorry for the rant

Looking for advice and insight for those of you who have dealt with this.

How does this monitoring software typically work? My biggest concern is that we are in a lot of meetings/Zoom calls and this counts as idle/not productive time if we aren’t actively scrolling or typing as well. And that calls taken from Zoom on our phones (logged in using our company single sign on ID) also don’t count. But leadership is not planning to share out specific results or what exactly is being monitored or even what the expected metrics are with us.

And now I have to communicate this to my team also and direct them to improve without any insight. I am planning to focus on explaining the hours they are expected to be available but also taking into account not just being available but when they are actively working and making sure it’s close enough to 40 hours. So if they are available 8-8:30 monitoring Teams and emails and lightly responding but not fully actively working yet, they need to consider that and really consider their start time 8:30 for number of hours.

We are hybrid 3 days in office. I am also concerned about not being able to step away for chats/meetings in the office now and having to make up that time because my screen is locked and I am away from my laptop.

And finally what if we can’t improve our metrics enough? Have you seen people get fired to these low metrics? In my experience it’s very hard to fire even when I knew team members were not actively showing up on time and missing calls, or not delivering. It takes a ton of work with HR to finally get someone out the door. I wonder if this will make it easier or if it will still be just as hard, especially if the team is delivering what is expected.

Any advice or personal experience on any of these points is welcome.

I’m a new manager and it’s definitely been a learning curve. What’s something you learned during your first year as a manager that you wish you learned faster?

A few months back I asked for advice here on how I should go about getting 2 of my reports promoted at the same time (original post), not expecting much success, but trying anyway. And I just wanted to update y'all that I finally did it!

It was a... journey, starting with me hijacking my own annual review to force a discussion with my elusive boss about my team to get her on board, then strategically using the crunch time caused by another department's lack of organization to showcase our efficiency (we're the last step before things become customer-facing, so if we didn't commit miracles, Sales would have had nothing to show). Also at some point our CEO came down to "get a read on the situation", and I let my people speak for themselves, and they impressed him a lot, apparently, so that probably also helped.

Normally my team "just makes things work out" and because we're so specialized, no one really understands how much technical and strategical skill is needed, and I had to become kind of a little bit inconvenient to get the right people to notice and appreciate what we do, which was so far out of my comfort zone.

It was a more stressful process than I anticipated, because (shockingly) the HR took an issue with the "senior" in the job title (even though when a man was in that position doing literally the same thing, it was fine).
After a lot of back and forth I ended up rewriting everyone's job descriptions (which, you know what, was a good thing anyway and needed to be updated at some point), and my manager came up with a different title that kept "associate" in the name but sounds more er, respectable, I guess? And I still managed to get them salaries that were on par with their expectations, and a set-in-stone review in 6 months with the possible additional raise if their performance warrants it.

So, my team is currently riding a high, I got approved for 2 whole interns for the summer (I literally only need one, I don't know if they felt I'd appreciate more??), and I am getting some equipment upgraded while the bosses are impressed with us. I cannot believe I managed to make it happen with everything that's going on in the world. I think if I let myself wait till things got better, it would not have worked - the offers went out just before the Iran thing started.

I'm not sure of the etiquette here, but I really wanted to thank u/Mundane-Anybody-8290 for the excellent suggestion on how I should frame the proposal (that it was a question of how they should spend the money, not if ) - I kind of built my whole proposal around that thought, and also it gave me the idea to pull historic data to show that previously (with a different roster), we did indeed need more people to be able to keep things running, so it wasn't just speculation on my part. Also, thank you to the many people who validated my gut feeling that if I picked one person over the other (instead of pushing for both), it would really mess up the team dynamic and make whoever got passed up mentally check out.

Somewhat long so TLDR at the bottom. I'm fairly new to people leadership (2-3 years) and recently joined a company on a 1 year contract while the incumbent (lets call them Carrie) is on leave. Within the first month, I was asked to fire a member of the existing team (let's call them Alan) with my boss saying "everyone has problems with them" but very little else to go on. My boss would also like me to write up a new job description to hire someone else at a more senior level within the department that is "more qualified" (let's call them Bob - I dont believe my boss is partial to Bob though, I'm sure this was a suggestion from Carrie ). I have asked for some feedback from team members on Alan and 2 of the 4 I asked had significant negative feedback but they also highlighted that this issue has been ongoing for at least a year. When I asked my boss why the decision was delayed despite these issues, my boss vaguely mentioned the timing didn't work out and HR was worried about optics at that time. The thing is, I found out that Alan's previous manager wanted to rate them as underperforming in the last annual review but was overridden by my boss to be "performing". Alan had also never been put on a PIP but was given feedback multiple times about their issues. Just to cover all my bases, I spoke to HR and this time they saw no issue with going forward with the firing but did caution that this employee is known to be difficult.

All this is being exacerbated by the fact that 1) Carrie didnt leave any documentation relating to their plan for Alan or Bob 2) this particular team's job scope is outside my area of expertise meaning I have no way of judging if Alan or Bob are good/bad at their job outside of what others tell me 3) being new to the organization I'm still trying to figure out how everything works and the dynamics between the various teams

TLDR: joined new team on 1 year contract. boss wants me to fire employee A (who is said to have performance issues) and hire employee B for a more senior role. Nothing is documented (from incumbent or my boss) and no PIP but HR doesnt see issues other than employee A being difficult.

What's the best way to move forward in this sticky situation? My gut is telling me that they're trying to take the easy way out by having a temp like me do the firing. I've also never fired anyone before so I wonder if it's just first timer jitters. Any advice is greatly appreciated!