“I didn’t mean to raise my voice, but I guess things just escalated.” Karyn was describing this latest blowup with one of her team members. “I am only her supervisor on the weekend, so I feel a little helpless. Her weekday supervisor lets her get away with leaving early. I talked to Rick about it. He just doesn’t want to confront her.”
“And when you stopped her from leaving early, the conversation turned grisly and she left anyway?”
Karyn nodded her head slowly. “And next Saturday, I don’t know what to do or say. I can’t just pretend nothing happened?”
“Oh, you could. Hope is a strategy. You could hope she doesn’t blow up again. You could hope she doesn’t leave early again. You could hope she gets all of her work done. But if hope doesn’t work, what are you going to say and when are you going to say it?”
Karyn scrunched her face, “I don’t want to wait until she tries to walk out the door again. Then it will be Groundhog Day all over again.”
“So, when would be a better time to talk to her?”
“I think early in the day, perhaps at the very beginning.”
“Good, then there won’t be the drama of her trying to leave at that moment. Now, what are you going to say?” Karyn struggled with this question. No response.
“Karyn, I want you think about this. You cannot stumble into this conversation. You have to be prepared. Think about this and we will talk again. Think along these lines. I want you to be both sensitive and straight. What will you say?” -TF
The managers conversation with her should be geared towards understanding why she needs to leave early — if it’s critical to her that she leaves early then are there other options; maybe arrive earlier to work. Conversation should also include communicating the value she adds, and your expectations and consequences for insubordination.
Obviously this employee is playing managers off of one another. Yet, because there are mixed signals, it makes it pretty difficult to truly address this situation until the managers themselves come to a consensus on the issue.
Otherwise there seems to be no leverage to work with what is actually causing the problem in the first place.
The first thing I would do would be to get together with the other managers and get that taken care of before I thought about confronting the worker.