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The first thing to do when managing the unmanageable is to be certain of your own direction and purpose. If you are not correct or comfortable in your role, it will be quite difficult to manage others, especially those who are not correct or comfortable in their roles.

So by now you know your overarching responsibility is to "spin the invoice printer" and to do so in a legal, moral and ethical way. Of course, these are high sounding terms which must be properly interpreted and adapted to your own unique set of conditions. Just make sure you do a great job of doing this.

Your subordinates came to you by one of three routes. You were promoted to be their boss, they transferred into your area of responsibility or they were hired in from the outside. How you treat them depends somewhat on how you acquired them.

If you were dropped in from the outside to take charge and straighten out a mess (isn't there always a mess?), you can start with large platitudes and follow up with one-on-one meetings with your direct reports. That is, if it is a large group. If it is a small group, you can meet with each individual one-on-one. However, even if it is a large group, regularly parachute into the ranks and have small group or individual meetings there. In all cases, make sure you behave exactly or better than the standards you are setting for your subordinates.

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If an employee is transferred into your group, this is a special case. Other managers in large corporations (and small ones, too, no doubt) do not give up their best team members. You likely just received damaged goods. Asking this person's former boss a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of this person is a waste of time. They are only going to tell you the good stuff. Personal meetings, lots of them, will be needed to get such persons performing as you need them to perform, if it is possible at all.

Unsaid, such a person is coming to you with habits from a previous nest, and has interpreted his or her previous nest as living by the guidelines and principles of the corporation for which both of you have worked for some time. Of course, this is not true and you both know it. That former abode had its own eccentricities, foibles and interpretations of the mother ship's directives. They are not yours and the sooner the new person understands this, the better. If this person is a hard case, he or she will keep bringing up how things were done at the other place. I saw this played out once in a prim and proper engineering office of which I was in charge when I found scrawled on the bathroom wall, "I don't give a damn how they do it in (major Scandinavian capital city)." Obviously one of our locals had had it up to here with an ex-pat's attempt to change us to their way of thinking. When you work for me, you may have input but eventually you will follow my direction if you don't persuade me your way is better.

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Finally, we have the case of the new-hire. The young new hires take a lot of coaching. The first thing they need to understand is that their employer expects to make a profit on their being in the corporation. In other words, their total cost is expected to be less than what their contribution means to the sales of the company. Young people seem often to have trouble with this--"why should the company make money off of me?" The real answer is that is the only reason to hire you. "If, in the long run we cannot make money off you, why would we hire you?" Beyond that, the newbies have all sorts of habits you have to straighten out. And, it seems like as time as gone by (or is it just me getting older?) the newbies come in more clueless and with more bad habits than ever before. One-on-one coaching by you or by someone you trust is the only way to get these folks headed in a path of value to the corporation.

Then there is the new-hire who has some experience and comes from a different company. These folks come from one of two extremes--from the very valuable who bring all sorts of new ideas to the worthless, the clear result of a hiring mistake.

The theme through all of this is this: know your subordinates, work closely with your subordinates. Don't assume anything if you want to build a great team. Sports team management is a good example to follow here. They move people around all the time. They put everyone through the same training and objective setting, no matter where they came from. You should do the same.

Have I missed any issues here? Let us know in our quiz this week. You may take it here.

For safety this week, not once above did I mention safety training. But you already knew that it comes first, right?

Be safe and we will talk next week.

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