151–160 of 278 posts
Extremely important advice. Add to that: push upper management for change details, keep timelines and punctuality, define delivery, be up front on status and results, go home at a reasonable hour, take people to lunch or otherwise spend time with them, make your team appointments your number one priority, and praise publicly/coach privately.
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While I certainly agree that jokes are dangerous , they're also a key way humans form social connections! I do think a sense of humor is important for building a rapport with colleagues.
Many ordinary social interactions have become sins recently. Saying anything that could be interpreted as offensive poses a very real risk to your career, the list of potentially offensive things is incredibly long, and gets longer with each passing moment as novel outrages pop up in all corners of the world. You can still be kind, empathetic and polite to everybody you work with. But avoiding authentic personal rela…
“Bring your true self to work” and other modern workplace nonsense is risky advice to take seriously. It’s mostly a coded communication that does not mean what it appears to on the surface.
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Good general advice. Had a manager who would say to folks “you won’t get fired for xyz”. Even the mention of firing made the environment unpleasant. Now I fully appreciate how words can have a profound effect on morale.
There is a person in my management chain who makes occasional references to being fired along the lines of “If someone did X they’d be instantly let go.” I find that it makes for an uncomfortable work environment - I’ve never heard managers speak this way before. To be clear, I am not speaking about some bright-line issue that comes up in required training. It makes me think that they are a weak “rules lawyer” type,…
Sometimes we joke about things to reduce fear, but sometimes joking about things normalizes them.
I run a Mastodon instance and every time one of my users posts a really, really terrible pun there is such a strong temptation to say "oh god that was terrible, you're banned forever". And then I stop and think about how a few of the people on there have some really bad social anxiety, and I find some other way to say "holy shit that was a terrible pun, well done". It's a similar thing, I think. I'm unexpectedly in a…
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Off topic. Do firings come out of the blue though? I was a VP for a while (not anymore) - but when the person I had to fire was about to get fired, they KNEW it as soon as the door opened. Firing someone is the worst experience ever - the only reason I had to fire someone was because WE screwed up in the interview process.
I've seen a couple of mass layoffs. How much you see that coming can be a function of how close to the decision-making you are and how familiar you are with the process. As I've advanced, I've progressively seen it coming farther out. But the first one was totally out of the blue to me. Individual firings seem a bit more predictable.
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The reason you don't joke about firing someone is because of the power imbalance. The employee will usually be in a bad spot if they actually are fired, and the company will be fine (usually better off, even). Furthermore, there's no real recourse on the employee side. If they are offended by the joke they can't really complain, because if the boss is so tone deaf as to joke about firing, they're unlikely to take cri…
>The employee will usually be in a bad spot if they actually are fired, and the company will be fine (usually better off, even). Boss, to employee: "I'd just like you to know that I'd never joke about firing you. I recognise that it would be needlessly cruel because, although you're reliant on the company to earn a living, the company would actually be better off without you." D:
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Off topic. Do firings come out of the blue though? I was a VP for a while (not anymore) - but when the person I had to fire was about to get fired, they KNEW it as soon as the door opened. Firing someone is the worst experience ever - the only reason I had to fire someone was because WE screwed up in the interview process.
> Firing someone is the worst experience ever I mean... yeah, it sucks, but have you tried being fired ?
It's weird, I have worked at many organisations - and at almost none of them did my manager have the ability to fire me. Is this an American thing? In most of these orgs, getting rid of someone is kind of hard work, usually involving a lot of HR. A manager would have much more luck getting you moved to a different team.
Everywhere in the US you can’t be fired for your country of origin or due to age (these aren’t always easy to prove of course) but, for example, if the boss decided to get rid of all left-handed people one day that would be perfectly legal.
That's excellent advice that many have learned the hard way... Honestly even as a non-manager it's a very bad idea. When I was a junior one of my colleagues was called to the manager's office. I assumed it would be for some mundane project scheduling or whatever, so I jokingly said "you're getting fired" as he was going there. And he was. This is one of these memories that come back to haunt you late at night when yo…
3 years ago, I had a talk with the Chief Senior Physician of the hospital my mum was treated. She was terminally ill, she was fightiing for weeks, but there was no hope left. So it was decided to end all life support measures. When I went back to my car, where my then-minor sister was waiting for news, I said: "Sie hat es geschafft.", which literally means "She made it" in German - however, I meant it in the meaning…
example question: "Is this job running?" (implied: is it "working"?)
Answer: "No, it is not currently running however I see it is scheduled to run daily at 7pm. I don't see any errors in the past 2 days. Did you expect it to import data recently?"
That's excellent advice that many have learned the hard way... Honestly even as a non-manager it's a very bad idea. When I was a junior one of my colleagues was called to the manager's office. I assumed it would be for some mundane project scheduling or whatever, so I jokingly said "you're getting fired" as he was going there. And he was. This is one of these memories that come back to haunt you late at night when yo…
3 years ago, I had a talk with the Chief Senior Physician of the hospital my mum was treated. She was terminally ill, she was fightiing for weeks, but there was no hope left. So it was decided to end all life support measures. When I went back to my car, where my then-minor sister was waiting for news, I said: "Sie hat es geschafft.", which literally means "She made it" in German - however, I meant it in the meaning…