Are You In Charge At Work?

Being a manager has its ups and downs. Its ups are that you have certain privileges that others don't, more respect due to your position and hopefully, you are making more money than you were before you got your promotion. The downs are: longer hours, more stress, more responsibilities, heavier workload just to mention a few. But, the most pressing one is that 'the buck stops with you'! When things go wrong, ultimately you are responsible. Not Joe Blow or Jane Beasleyetanetta, but YOU. So, I will ask the question, who really is in charge at work?

In a typical day at one of my management positions, things usually started out really well. That's until the staff arrived at work. Then things generally went to hell. I spent most of my day fixing the stuff ups of my team, talking to angry customers when this wasn't done like promised and that wasn't delivered like promised etc. It was a real nightmare until I realized what was going on. We are all good at blaming others when things go wrong but rarely do we look at ourselves first. It's sometimes hard to do that especially when we think of ourselves as being good at our jobs. But are we that good? After thinking about it very hard one night, I came to the conclusion that maybe its not my staff that are to blame for all their mistakes but I am. Maybe they are not as incompetent as I think but perhaps I haven't communicated my directions clearly enough. If it was just one or two that were stuffing up then it could be reasoned that those individuals are to blame. But if just about all of the team members are making the same mistakes, then maybe it's me that's to blame.

Part of being in charge at work is realizing that you don't know everything and that you need to work on things that you don't know. To be truly in charge is knowing what doesn't work, what resources you need to make things work that aren't and stop doing the things that aren't working and changing them to things that do work. This worked in my case. After I thought about all the things that were going wrong, instead of blaming my staff (whom I'm sure were also blaming me for the stuff ups but they never said so) I set about and worked out how to fix things and have better and efficient procedures in place. Off course, I asked the staff what they thought and got their input. I then set about and wrote a simple Standard Operations Manual (SOP) and distributed it to every staff member. I took ownership of my responsibilities and in that way, I became truly in charge at work.

Playing the blame game is not for managers who take their job seriously. The buck does stop with you and if you are not in control of what goes on in your department, rest assured, your staff aren't either. If they are, then you have a problem and aren't doing what you are paid to do. If you are having issue after issue with people seemingly not doing their job well, then start with yourself and see whether or not you know what's going on and if you have communicated your expectations clearly and precisely. You will find usually, with a few exceptions off course, that a simple issue like that is the cause for all those stuff ups.