A member asked me this question recently and agreed that I can share. Let’s call this member – Alex. I really appreciated how much detail Alex shared in his questions. I was able to better guide him toward how to best resolve this difficult situation as a result. Here is Alex’s situation and our email exchanges. Thank you Alex for agreeing to share this.
Alex sent this via Ask Me Anything
Hi Lei, I’m excited to join this community and work with you to improve my soft skills. Below is a work situation I recently encountered. I look forward to your thoughts on this.
What would you like to ask me?
I’ve recently encountered a situation: I was promoted to manager last year and now I have one direct report (an individual contributor) and my boss is the senior manager. My direct report has only been in current role for a few months. Then he interviewed for another promotion a month back and got it. It’s with a different group. The whole thing was under the radar, and I didn’t quite know about it till that group took him out for lunch to celebrate…(we have an open office so you kinda know these things if you pay attention). When I asked my boss about this, she said the direct report will stay on our project for a few months, and won’t transition so quickly. She even said it’s not for certain if the promotion was set in stone.
Right now, my direct report (let’s call him Mark) handles some of the basic admin tasks for the team (such as opening purchase order, run some regular meetings). He reached out to me today and wanted to discuss transitioning these responsibilities to me because he’ll be stretched thin across two roles.
We work on a highly visible big project in our company. My plate is already quite full and I don’t think it’s a good use of my time handling administrative tasks, which will be time consuming. I’m also shocked that he proposed something like this very casually over skype vs. sitting down and having a conversation.
Please tell me some background information around your question?
My direct report is a capable individual. When he moved to my project, he’s already of the mindset he wants to and should have been promoted. From the beginning, he’s been trying to push off misc. tasks or tasks he deemed as basic tasks. So I’m not surprised he made this request today.
We work on this highly visible project and everyone is under extreme scrutiny and lots of stress. For me to take on the additional work will not be fair and doesn’t seem to help with my development either.
Another thing that’s important to know is, the project is not going very well right now. We’ve run into some big regulatory roadblocks and the launch of the new product will be delayed. I could sense my team is stressed. So just want to be mindful of that when dealing with this situation.
What do you think you should do? What options have you considered?
I’ve reached out to my boss, the senior manager, and asked if she knew any of this. It turned out she didn’t…She asked me to set up a meeting for the 3 of us to discuss and align. The meeting will be on next Monday.
A couple things I think I should do:
- Listen to the situation. I think there’s miscommunication / lack of transparency with this whole situation. I heard he wasn’t supposed to transfer to the other project so quickly but it doesn’t seem to be the case. I do want to get a sense of what really is the expectation here, from his new group and our group.
- I would like to prepare a list of my big projects, to demonstrate I’m at my full capacity and might not be able to take on any more tasks.
Your level of work experience
6-9 years
Some Tips to Help Alex
Thanks Alex for sharing your situation. I am glad you have a meeting set up between all three of you on Monday. I also agree with your analysis and approach of listening to find out what’s really going on with Mark and his new job.
Is it correct to assume your manager already knew about the fact Mark interviewed for a different job and got it before you? Is Mark going to a different group that is also under your manager? It’s curious your manager says the promotion he got is not set and it will take a few months and yet he wants to talk about transition now.
I think it’s will be important to understand the real situation of when Mark is starting his new job. If it’s in two weeks for example, you really cannot keep him unless your manager is still his big boss and can change that.
With that said, I don’t agree with your second approach of “prepare a list of my big projects, to demonstrate I’m at my full capacity and might not be able to take on any more tasks.” That’s what a individual contributor does. I think there is better way to approach this.
You need to come to the meeting with two purpose:
Purpose 1: Create a shared urgency with your manager about this highly visible project. I assume it won’t be good for her or for you if you experience more delays. So you want to make sure your boss understand how Mark leaving sooner will put that in jeopardy. This will then be less about you and more about the greater good of the project
Purpose 2: Be a problem solver for your boss for this issue. Think about options to propose on how to solve this issue.
- Option 1 – see if you can negotiate for Mark to stay for x months longer and lay out what he would need to own and finish. In this case it cannot just be administrative tasks. No one is motivated by being someone’s admin. You actually need to give him a part of the project problem to solve. That way he owns the fun and the admin part of that work vs just the admin part.
- Option 2 – if Mark must leave in two weeks, share with your boss you will need another resource to help with xyz in order to keep the project on track. This way it’s less about you and more about the project. Perhaps you can hire a contractor to do this or your boss may offer other ideas.
I know you are a new manager. I can tell also you may be competitive with Mark a little bit. It’s a natural tendency. I went through it myself. I would watch out for that perspective. A good manager is someone who can delegate problems for their team to help solve vs just admin tasks. If you say Mark is smart and capable then be the manager and offer a part of the project problem for him to solve if your manager can convince him to stay a few months. This way you can keep your project on track. He can do something more meaningful and you don’t have to kill yourself.
I hope this helps. Let me know if you have follow up questions and how it goes.
Follow up Email from Alex
Thank you very much for your response. My biggest takeaway from your feedback is a mindset shift of approaching this matter with a manager’s (vs. an individual contributor’s) perspective: thinking about the greater good of the project vs. how this impacts me personally.
I got further information from my manager after I sent the initial email to you. There seems to be some miscommunication. My manager (and her manager, the Director we all report to) thinks Mark won’t transfer for a few months till a replacement was identified (so our project is not at jeopardy). So they were surprised that Mark wanted to hand off tasks this soon. So on Monday we’ll talk through all these so everyone will be on the same page.
Right now, Mark does have responsibilities of very important strategic projects. The admin tasks are only about 20% of his entire projects. Before I found out this new offer, I actually have been giving him more meaty projects that he finds interesting which gives him more visibility to leadership. But I do agree with your recommendation: we should find a way to motivate him, for example by giving him more challenging projects as you suggested. If that turns out to be too much workload, maybe it’s helping him prioritize him time to focus on more on the strategic projects vs. time on admin tasks. Will continue to give this more thoughts.
Good call-out on me feeling competitive with him – I’m aware of it and will watch out for that. One thing I forgot to mention is his new job (promotion) might actually take away some of my big projects. The company is going through some re-structure and lots of new roles and responsibilities aren’t clearly defined yet. And in the last few weeks since he knew about the promotion, there were one or two incidents when he seemed to overstep the boundaries on presenting things I should be in charge of. That’s probably when I started to feel competitive…
Again I appreciate your feedback – this incidence (and reading many of your articles) just makes me realize I’ve got tons of soft skills to learn. Improving soft skills is the biggest feedback I got from my manager this year. I’m glad I found your website and will make it priority to develop them. Will let you know how this goes!
Your comments: Do you have additional advice for Alex? What else would you do in this situation? I look forward to your comments
Your comments: Do you have an inner voice that tells you that you are not enough? Do you where it comes from and how to ignore it? I look forward to hearing from you.
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Lei