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Take your notes from your management style conversation and keep them in mind every time you talk with them. Bring them up to extra-clarify everything, and make sure you take detailed bullets of everything they tell you to do. Say them out loud to get the senior to confirm those are the steps. Then, if they say, we talked about this before, be confident in telling them that you didn’t (and remind them of what you *did* talk about instead). The important next step is to follow up that refute with, “but how can I fix it?”, and take extra detailed notes and confirm back with them the notes you’ve taken on your next steps. It’s important to remember it’s okay and you’ll need to be cool with accepting “light” fault and casually “apologizing” for having to reconfirm action items with them until their behavior improves. Then at least if it’s brought up in a review, you can tell your manager or partner what steps you’ve taken to improve the conversation and communication between you and the senior.
Take heart, push through with these methods, and remember, you will be promoted before too long and can treat your staff infinitely better. 😊
Good luck!! 🍀
It is totally a struggle, I get it.
Just try not to be so hard on yourself (easier said than done, I know), and preface conversations, or reaching out, with “hey, just to be clear… this one point was a little fuzzy with me… when you said X did you mean Y or Z…?”
If they are hard on you when you are trying to frame it as you need to ask because you didn’t catch it 100% the first time, they just suck. But the question is, if they suck, what can you do? And that goes back to the advice previously.
And to the thank you point, you won’t get as many thank yous as you should, and you really should get them sometimes, but it is also your job and you are apart of a team, so it’s for the betterment of everyone to bring it up. What they do with it is on them. But remember for your own sake, catching stuff like that will make you better regardless of what they think or if they thank you. Applying your mind is important and beneficial. You’ll be a senior at some point, then a manager, and those things you thought of and caught will serve you in the future. For now, just try your best to get enough clear instruction to complete your work efficiently. 😊
Chief
Can you give us some examples?
That sounds pretty toxic. As pwc1 above mentions, first step would be to talk to your counselor. But unless it's a fixable situation, the best solution might be to simply switch teams... I've seen similar cases where some people just didn't "click" and asked to be in different teams to alleviate the stress and tension.
Happy 9/15 everyone! Thank you so much for all your warm responses and encouragement. As a staff, I definitely admire this senior’s work ethic and I would be proud of myself if I know as much as they do when I become a senior. I have been thinking in the past few days how I would feel if I were in their shoes. Will I be aware of my staff’s feelings that I am treating them differently? Will I agree with them if they do let me know that they believe I am being impatient or unfair to them? Will I feel frustrated if I do think I explained everything so well but it just seems like they don’t absorb all the info as quickly? I know the senior wants nothing but to get the work done, but along the way perhaps they could show a bit more patience to questions asked by all staff and avoid saying “we’ve discussed this before” and follow up with them if time allows to increase team morale. To all the seniors, managers and SM in this post, you all sound like wonderful bosses to work for. Hopefully one day I can make my staff feel the same way you guys make me feel in this post.
Is there a manager or senior manager on the project that you feel comfortable talking with? If one of my staff felt that they were being treated unfairly I would hope that they would come to me so that I can help. Talking with the manager or senior manager may also open up other avenues for you to work with other seniors. Everyone has bias but it sounds like your senior is unaware of theirs. That’s on them, not you. Whenever we’ve had issues with communication between different levels on my team, we’ve found it to be helpful to bring in a third party to confirm or contradict. If you aren’t comfortable addressing this directly with that senior (which is completely understandable) then I would definitely ask someone else to get involved. Your manager should be able to figure out a way to discuss this with that senior without disclosing that you came forward.
Talk to your coach, or any manager you have a good relationship with. I had a senior bring me ( and others) to tears and telling someone helped. We finished the engagement and never worked together again.
Hey OP. I’ve been there. I was a manager and i had this feeling that the SM on my engagement was biased against me. But everyone else loved him so i kept convincing myself that this was all in my head and kept trying to find ways to get into his good books. Needless to say, it didn’t work and ended up impacting my performance, my confidence and looking back i realise i’d been pushed into depression.
One thing i wish i’d done is stand up for myself. But it does depend on the office culture as well.
Remember - it’s NOT YOU. Take yourself out of this situation. I was a manager, and a high performing manager when this happened to me so i knew deep down i was good at my job. You’re just starting out and this kind of experience can make you question your own abilities.
I know I will keep working with them more in the future so I definitely don’t want myself to think that they don’t like me. This “being treated differently” feeling started after spending the first two weeks working with them, so I actually scheduled a call the third week to ask about their preferences, management styles, details about how they like certain things to be done. They actually sounded pretty chill over the phone so I thought maybe things would get better but I guess not. I just can’t seem to work in the way that will make them satisfied.