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Keeping Your Workforce Happy Is Hard. Don’t Underestimate What Happens When You Become A Boss.
Welcome to the confronting realities of people management.
It won’t be long before my self-run business needs staff. And I’m losing sleep about one thing; happiness.
Theirs, not mine.
I know how I can make myself happy. But when you’re a boss, in charge of people, the deciding factor whether people work for you or not, happiness is in your hands.
I’ll admit I’ve left jobs because I hated the boss. Well, hate is a strong word. It was more like the boss didn’t care about me or what I had to say. And that didn’t exactly leave me happy at the end of the day.
Knowing full well I could easily leave a well-paying job because of one person, a staff member working for me could too. It means I have to get it right. I can’t make an employee unhappy to the brink of quitting.
When I hire staff, it won’t be the first time I’ve managed staff members, though. I was thrown into the deep end of staff management when I was nineteen.
No training, no guidance, just a set of keys and instructions to dress the part.
I could tell by the end of my first shift I didn’t quite have the management goods yet. I consider myself lucky; I found this out (and stuffed it up) on someone else’s dime and time.
But I know some of you might not have the luxury to do that. You’re learning on the fly, learning out of desperation.
For those who want to know what the confronting realities of people management are, this is for you.
Requests or absurdities?
The people who work for you are going to ask a million things of you. If we’re thinking about what our role is, it’s that of a parent.
You’re teaching them how to walk and run. And once they know how to do this, you’re their strength, keeping on them on the right path.
This sounds all well and good, like a fairy tale. That is until you get your hands dirty. And the requests start sounding like a five-year-old having a tantrum in the middle of a busy supermarket.
