The day I was called out as an ‘inept’ manager

Here’s a snippet from a Glassdoor review.

See the bit where it talks about the inept management, well, that’s me.

I was getting quite good at dealing with the feeling of loneliness that comes with leadership, but I wasn’t prepared to be publicly shamed for my failings, at least in this person’s opinion. It came out of nowhere and my God it hurt!

I let it hurt me for three days until I realised it hurt so much because I cared so much, and that made me a good person. That thought, a few nice phone calls from my team and a pizza made me feel better. And, so like anything painful, it taught me something very valuable.

Nothing happens behind closed doors anymore, in fact there are no doors. Gossip doesn’t stay between teammates in a secret cupboard chat or confined within the 4th floor of the office. Our staff have all the anonymity to say what they like and as leaders we’ve never been in a more visible position. Our people’s views of us can be shared with the world in a click.

I use the above Glassdoor review in training our team as an example of how powerful and permanent our people’s voice is. This review is 18 months old and still alive and kicking online. Despite all the commitment in the world, someone else can view you as failing and say it . And sometimes, as leaders, we have to make hard decisions which make us unpopular for a while. These decisions will stir opinion and people will share it.

So that’s why the second thing I did on my first day at Jiminny was define how our leadership team behave so we’re all completely aligned on what good looks like and we can hold ourselves accountable to those behaviours. As startups, we obsess with metrics, KPI’s, OKRs or whatever the next fancy acronym is. But do we obsess enough and provide enough clarity on how we behave in achieving those goals? Staff reviews rarely say “it sucks working here because we lost 25 clients last month and only hit 60% of sales target”. They use words that describe how it feels. And they’re prepared to tell the world about it.

But still, I’d choose to live in this environment everyday. The social world that’s crept inside our companies is here now and it forces us even more so to pay attention to how we act as leaders. I believe that’s a great thing and will make our companies so much stronger.

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