| I trust the accounting department to pay me on time. I trust the leadership of the company to make choices that provide enough money so that the accountants can do their job. I trust my boss to protect my time so that I can do my job. And I trust the other people on my team to be professional. That's it. Anything else asking too much, and anything less is not acceptable. If I can't count on each and every one of those things, I won't take a job. If any of those things get violated, I'm out. Of course there are different tolerance levels for different things. The people on your team are people. They have bad days. We all do. But if someone has too many bad days, then it goes back to the boss needing to protect my time. I don't know what the threshold is, but at a certain point, the boss needs to take action, so that my time isn't getting eaten up by an unprofessional coworker. That could mean someone who's just bad at his job, and I have to fix things. That could mean that there's some harassment going on. One of those could potentially be fixed with a pip. One of those needs to be addressed immediately. On the other hand, if a company fucks up payroll, I'm looking for a new gig immediately. That's it. We're done. I was in a management position for the first time at my last job, and I will soon be again at my new job. I actually have a lot more sympathy for managers than I used to. As a manager, you don't really have a group of peers you can expect to be professional. You have competitors who pretend to be peers. And that sucks. You're kind of alone. I highly recommend Michael Lopp's book, managing humans to anyone who hasn't read it. The bottom line is that I don't think my expectations are really out of line. I think of them as the bare minimum of what I will accept as an employee and the bare minimum of what I will provide as a manager. If I can't get that as an individual contributor, the company is broken. If I can't provide that as a manger, I'm broken. |