Staff members’ personal baggage can be a help, not a hindrance
In 1976, I worked at a local pizza joint after school. One of the managers was an older gentleman and a “jack-of-all-trades.” In addition to the daily register count, he painted, repaired, fixed, and stocked all day long. On the weekends, he painted apartments and, from time to time, asked some of us pizza boys to assist him for a couple of extra bucks.
He was known to be a moody guy, so we had learned how to appease him, or at least stay out of his way. One afternoon, I painted a ceiling with a roller on a pole, applied a little too much pressure, and snapped the rod. Paint spilled on the floor, and within seconds, he crossed over to me, grabbed the broken pole, and swung it at my head, missing me by an inch.
I said nothing, cleaned up the mess, walked out to my bike, and pedaled home. That was my last weekend paint job. The next day, back at the pizzeria, I passed by the old, moody manager. He simply handed me an envelope with payment for the previous day’s work. We never said another word about it. No apology, no excuses, and I didn’t tell my parents—I knew the type of person I was dealing with. This was probably my first lesson in personal politics. My childhood illusions (that all adults deserved respect) and my blind obedience were upended. The conclusion was short and sweet: that guy was a product of all the disrespect he had faced during his life, and he could only alleviate his pent-up anger by taking it out on those who couldn’t fight back.
An Inevitable Challenge
After that experience, I noticed similar behavior patterns in teachers, friends’ parents, and older people in authoritative positions, like bus drivers, waiters, and especially supervisors. They all had dirty laundry to wash out of their memories, and that undone laundry shaped the way they conducted business. Every part-time job I accepted involved getting “used to” the attitudes and biases of another individual. Long before I left for college, I was well aware these interpersonal conflicts were part of any job. I realized I had to manage the people who managed me.
The situation was the same with my college professors because, unlike my highly authoritative high school teachers, the profs were my contemporaries and often only a few years older. I moved toward graduation with cautious trepidation, anxious about what lay ahead.
As I prepared to enter the working world and searched for jobs, I found myself trying to manipulate the interviewers. Would the “challenge” of dealing with others’ personal agendas ever end? The answer was no. It was only the beginning.
The Empowerment Model
Years passed, and I worked my way up to supervisory jobs. Had I become the one others had to get used to so they could manipulate my biases and tendencies? Indeed, it happened no matter how hard I tried to prevent it. So, where’s the lesson? It’s quite simple—as a leader, you must come to terms with the fact that you cannot silence the part of you that’s a social, emotional, reactionary, and sometimes irrational entity. But you also cannot allow yourself to react using the type of raw emotion that leads you to swing a stick at an assistant’s head—and then pretend it never happened the following day.
In today’s professional climate, such a reaction would not only be ridiculous but also illegal. Leaders may feel the urge to unleash a similar reaction, but most professionals have learned to exercise control. Keeping a lid on those emotions is what separates good supervisors from bad ones. Competent leaders control their reactions and channel them properly. Those who can’t encourage staff to “go around” them, ignore them, or invoke dishonesty. “Should we tell the boss about this problem?” “Nah, he’ll just flip out and blame us.”
Becoming painfully aware of this inevitable business dilemma, I vowed to find a way to avoid the emotional manipulation. I researched the rewards associated with the management concept of empowerment. In the empowerment model, employees make a problem their own, accept intrinsic responsibility for solutions, and evoke personal emotions to solve problems. I found this to be a better way of utilizing all the personal baggage, channeling feelings into productive solutions. The better I came to know my staff, the better I was able to assign them projects that played to their strengths and abilities. Their emotions were tools, not hindrances.
According to https://www.acheivers.com, the elements of successful empowerment strategies are derived from trust and include the following “musts”:
- Delegate work responsibility based on role and skill sets.
- Set clear boundaries and expectations about when and how the work will be completed.
- Be flexible and allow employees to adjust their workday if needed.
- Ensure employees have the resources they need to be successful.
With this environment established, the supervisor should focus on the following:
- Fostering an environment of trust and psychological safety
- Building employee confidence with recognition and incentives
- Offering flexibility in work arrangements
- Asking employees for feedback and acting on it
- Supporting professional growth through coaching and delegation.
Ultimately, my goal is to bypass all the emotional attachments that employees bring to the table because of their biases and agendas. If a leader constructively utilizes those feelings through empowerment, what was once a lopsided outcome becomes a win-win—which is much better than hitting a team member with a stick.
