Scenario 4: Al

• This year has been an incredibly tough one for you.  You have two small children (aged 4 and 2) who you struggle to look after full time as you’ve chosen to home school them because of covid. Your partner was made redundant from their job a couple of months ago and their mental health is suffering.  You are now under significant financial pressure.  There doesn’t feel like there is a moment of the day when you aren’t worried about something and you never have any time for yourself.
• You know that you are failing in many areas in your role, you are anxious about making mistakes and find yourself checking your work (even simple things like calendar invites) over and over (and falling way behind in the process).
• You’ve also never quite figured out the intricacies of the new project management system and that slows you down.  You feel like the culture at Learnerbly is very young, everyone is talking about the new hobbies they’ve taken up, while you’re very close to burnout just trying to do your job.  You can’t really talk to anyone about it but you feel a long way from ever being able to Win Together or Create Impact.
• You are grateful to your Manager for having shown flexibility with regard to when you do your work this year but you just can’t see a solution to your having more time and space to concentrate - and to stop feeling so tired.
• You don’t really want to talk about your partner and their mental health, it feels like a betrayal to bring that up at work.   Honestly, you’re anxious that you might be about to be fired and that would be a financial disaster for your family - you can only just make the mortgage payments as it is.

A successful manager will:

• Respect you and the process and take time to have a full and structured conversation, even if they (and you) find some messages difficult to hear.
• Give clear and specific feedback and clarity on what needs to happen. Making it clear they stand ready to support you to improve your performance and modelling of the values.
• Talk in terms of Actions and their impact, rather than offering generalised statements or value judgements like ‘it seems you’re not coping very well’.
• Make space for you to share your emotional response with open questions whilst also respecting your boundaries and not seeking to rescue you.
• Empower you to explore and consider next steps: you won’t want time off work but you might consider making it clearer to everyone when you can be contacted and when you need focused time.
• You’d definitely appreciate a refresher on how best to use the project management system.

A less successful manager will:

• Avoid giving feedback for fear of upsetting you – keeping everything vague and allowing you to evade a real conversation with apologies and promises that you will make sure mistakes don’t happen again.
• Make you feel threatened by the prospect of a future BOT plan rather than making it clear that they want to address issues now, before that becomes necessary…
• Alternatively, they may overly reassure you that this ‘no big deal’ and not to worry about it.
• Become uncomfortable with your emotional response and close down the conversation or shower you with sympathy in a way that makes you uncomfortable.