As Managers, we each bring a particular set of skills to the table that will benefit our employees in unique ways. I make a concerted effort to focus on what I do bring to the table, rather than what I don’t. Because focusing on what one does not bring to the table lends itself to a quick and dark spiral downward. However, one quality I actively covet is Game Face. I don’t have it. I wish I did. Are people born with it, or is it a skill to be honed?

Game Face would have come in especially handy this morning. Our company holiday celebration was lovely all around, but it of course contains a lot of excitement. N.Lo, for instance, hasn’t napped in three days. K.Lo gets a little batty with so much stimulation, as does the Manager. And Housekeeping! And the Laundry Fairy! These departments are overwhelmed, and overwhelmed can quickly evolve into surly. It’s a perfect company storm.

The Manager planned to go to yoga, a.k.a. Exercise Place, for a healthy dose of calm. Getting out the door in time was perhaps difficult. N.Lo may have whined and fussed over the smallest of dissatisfactions. He may have bopped his coworker on the head twice and taken over a half hour to apologize. At which point he may have asked to go back to bed, only to kick the hell out of his crib 20 minutes later. K.Lo might have been pleasant until it was time to get dressed into her day clothes, at which point, she may have chosen yet another weather-inappropriate outfit, changed into an outfit that was more weather-appropriate at the Manager’s insistence, and seemed happy with that outfit until 30 seconds before departure.

The Manager may have then lost her mind. The CEO, who was attempting to sleep in despite the preceding mayhem, may have been treated to a small but dramatic show. The neighbors, too. We may have made it to Exercise Place despite it all. Maybe we were a few minutes late, but never mind. The real kicker may have been at pickup when the wind, no less than three times, swept away two coloring sheets belonging to one K.Lo. And the Manager, whose arms were unsuccessfully carrying one N.Lo, one coloring sheet by N.Lo, two yoga mats and K.Lo’s hand, attempted to chase down said runaway sheets, with marginal success the first one and a half times. And on the third time, the sheets may have blown halfway across the parking lot while the Manager struggled to keep tabs on two employees, two yoga mats and one remaining coloring sheet, imagining K.Lo’s dismay when we lost them for good. I should explain these coloring sheets are Very Important to K.Lo and we have made return trips to the gym when they’ve been previously forgotten. It may be a little headache. To be kind.

And the Manager, lacking Game Face, may have cursed a little while her children and the yoga mats spilled all over the place and the papers flew further away. Wouldn’t Game Face have been nice? As well as the wisdom and foresight and plain old common sense to carry all three coloring papers myself, period, the end? That would have made the morning more pleasant, and the company less traumatized, I feel. Something to work on in the future, unless it is in fact true that Game Facers are born and not made.

In the meantime, two fellow gym members were mercifully kind enough to grab the flying papers and return them to the Manager, who then rounded up two employees, two half-unrolled yoga mats, and three all-important coloring papers, and made her way to the company car. Feathers way too ruffled. And, considering, lucky to have made it across the lot with all company members intact and alive.

Becoming a Manager goes differently for everyone. I never had much prior experience in managing employees before hiring K.Lo (at all), and yet I found the first year of managing a relative breeze. Tiny employees are so portable, so pliable, so charming! Or maybe it was just K.Lo, at the time. Or even just me, at the time, with a seemingly infinite supply of patience, and maybe even a natural inclination toward managing new hires? Also, managing was so much better than my former occupation(s) that my job satisfaction level with this new gig remained steadily high. Or maybe I'm rewriting company history.


When I think about K.Lo's first year of employment, the word ease comes to mind. Yes, there were difficult issues, such as (always) a lack of productivity on the Night Shift. Or like the time I read about not feeding the little dears raw honey and wondering with a chill what other important memos I might have missed. But, for the most part, I felt equipped to handle these problems, mainly because in the first year, training employees involves so much purely physical, standard work. Change the diapers, serve meals in the cafeteria, etc. It is tiring, yes, and involves acquiring a whole new skill set, but problems seemed to have fairly simple solutions. Consult a training manual here, confer with a colleague there, or simply wait it out, and more often than not, the issue would be overcome. Managing was not easy, necessarily, but it was simple.

After K.Lo reached her one-year date-of-hire anniversary, the energy required to manage my employee changed. In addition to the physical work of guiding K.Lo through her day, interactions became increasingly complex. Social. Requiring, from moment to moment, so much more managerial finesse. Granted, by then our company had decided to bring a second employee on board, so my energy was compromised in another way. But overall, I felt, and still feel, that managing employees is a much more challenging endeavor after that first year.

If requested, I could submit to you a specific log of our workday, but it would only cover the concrete details: what projects each employee worked on, what meals were served and eaten in the cafeteria, what topics were covered in each training session, dialogues between Management and employee. I could never begin to cover the more abstract details of the workday, specifically the thought process behind each managerial decision. Explaining the "why" of each negotiation. These decisions are based on so many nuances: employee mood, managerial mood, current shift, recent progress reports, scheduling, workday agendas, and so forth. Making these decisions requires, above all, a lot of intuitive energy, and that is where my resources feel spent.

Mainly, due to my lack of prior managerial experience, I don't already possess the sort of intuition required for this job: I have to build it. I am building it. Every day I'm acquiring more skills, and practicing already-learned skills, building up my resume for managing small employees.

I am putting some good tricks in my bag, tricks that eventually (hopefully) will become second nature to employ.

*Note: hang in there on this post. It might, in the end, be worth it. 

One of the things I like so much about writing, as opposed to talking, is the ability to think about and edit what I'm going to say before I say it. Being human, I'm not always perfect on the first try with speaking. I do get disappointed in myself as a Manager maybe too much with this shortcoming, but once you speak the words, they are what they are, and you can't take them back. So you can't worry about it too much, just try and do better the next time.

For instance, I don't particularly like to tell my employees they are "being bad," but well, sometimes they are being bad, or at least the one who's been with the company long enough to be bad is being bad. I know, according to all the Managerial Training Books, managers shouldn't really phrase admonitions this way to their employees; it doesn't help productivity or overall work satisfaction for anyone in the company. A manager instead should patiently point out that the behavior is "not acceptable," advise of the "appropriate behavior," and/or distract the employee, blah blah blah. Maybe in an ideal office environment, where The Manager has an unlimited supply of patience and perfection, this procedure would always be possible. Frankly, it's less that I don't want to tell K.Lo she is "being bad"--because if she is, she needs to know. It's just that there are better ways to say it. That way is not always on the tip of my tongue.

On the other hand, not communicating the right words can be entertaining, even when you don't mean them to be. After clocking in from Break this afternoon, K.Lo filled her chocolate quota for the day, and then continued to ask for more. I offered the alternate options of "pretzels, grapes, or... that's it." It didn't exactly make sense. But K.Lo, not going for the first two options, settled on the "that's it," requesting whatever a "thatsit" is several times. Maybe she thought it was made of chocolate.

Bringing another employee on staff so soon after hiring the first was a decision made under the influence. Not the influence of mind-altering substances, but the influence of a happy, productive little employee with a limited, though extremely charming skill set: K.Lo wasn't even walking when we decided to bring N.Lo on board. Our office is thrilled with our new employee, wouldn't think of hiring anyone else for the job, but the entire Managerial Staff admits that training two new-hires at once can often be... difficult.

Particularly on company excursions, our staff draws questions and comments regarding how we do it. How do we get out of the office. How do we maintain a productive, at-all efficient environment within the office. How do we even function, period. The short response is, I have no idea. The longer, true response is that it takes an enormous amount of managerial preparation.

As a manager, I tend to do a lot of this preparation in my head, which quickly becomes a juggling act, and a tiresome one at that. Although I may appear calm, cool, and collected on the exterior (or at least, that's the goal), internally, I am constantly organizing, adjusting, editing, sifting, sorting, and mainly just trying to keep all those balls in the air. Often, a ball gets dropped, to which I have to say, what can you do. You just pick it up, if you can, and add it back into the mix. When managing such a young company, I have found it's wiser not to worry so much about the dropping.

I also make a lot of lists. I would be lost without lists. Office supply lists, upcoming function lists, to-do lists. My Personal Assistant's main function is to make lists.

As for company excursions, the basic, physical act of it has to be broken down into amazingly small steps. Negotiating myself and our two employees from the office to the company car, for instance, not to mention everything we need for the trip, is a process that demands pause, followed by careful consideration, and then (finally) action:

Step 1. Prepare self for excursion, i.e. change of clothes, trip to employee rest room, and gathering of all excursion materials for self, such as water, phone, briefcase, office supply list.
Step 2. Gather all excursion materials for employees, such as juice, blankets, burp cloths, hats, company car toy, snack, jackets, pacifier.
Step 3. Clothe, diaper, and feed employees.
Step 4. Rally employees for excursion, attempt to garner enthusiasm, i.e. "We're going to COSTCO!"
Step 5. Secure new employee in company car seat.
Step 6. Gather as many excursion materials as humanly possible, take older employee by hand to company car, deposit excursion materials, buckle employee into car seat.
Step 7. Return to house for new employee, install car seat in company car.
Step 8. Return to house for inevitable missing/forgotten excursion items.
Step 9. Remember Managerial Snack, weigh possibility of starvation with inconvenience of returning to office for third time. Curse a little, return to office, and retrieve Managerial Snack.
Step 10. GO.

A detailed procedure such as this is required for every company excursion, and is only the first procedure of many on the actual excursion itself, as The Manager must then oversee all-company travel from the car to the store, navigation of the store itself, travel from the store back into the car, and travel from the car back into the office--with newly purchased office supplies in tow. And the implications are weighty; if not carefully thought out, a manager might find herself chasing an overly-ambitious employee into traffic, while leaving the other screaming in the rain.

One thing that must be noted about my career: I went into it without a lot of managerial experience, with very little background. I never managed in the past for pay, and had very little experience in general with small employees. Why I decided to become a manager is perhaps material for another workday, another file in the cabinet, but for now let me say that before entering into this career, there were certain managerial practices that I found off-putting, that I did not picture myself using. One of these practices is holding multiple conversations while taking calls.

The Regional Manager informs me that it must be an American Tradition for employees to demand a lot of attention the instant a call comes through on the office phone. So true. Every day during Lunch Hour, our CEO checks in on the company to see how things are running. Lately, K.Lo specifically requests to speak with the CEO, wishing to report on her current project. For example, today she was eating an orange, and so whispered, "Or-nage," (pronounced just this way) three or four times into the phone. Yesterday, it was "Chick-en," as she was eating chicken, and the day before that, it was "Shirt," as she had just put on a shirt. She follows this report (prompted by The Manager) with, "Bye-bye, Dad-dy," and "I loves you, Dad-dy," also spoken slowly and in a whisper.

This exemplary employee phone etiquette is case in point: When the employee speaks with the CEO, all rolls magically well, but when The Manager is speaking, employee requests for assistance automatically skyrocket. N.Lo is suddenly starving, K.Lo has done something or other with her employee meal that requires twenty napkins, N.Lo needs to be held, K.Lo needs to be held, employee conflicts arise because clearly both cannot be held at once, and then they all need a diaper change. And possibly some time in the Employee Bath.

I feel so often like one of those managers on TV, in a scene where the kids are screeching, the dogs are barking, and the manager is shouting above it all, trying to dispel the chaos surrounding her, all while holding a conversation with a client or business associate on the other end of the phone. The manager is distracted, the conversation disjointed. It's loud and frantic, where I prefer calm and cool. On TV, it's supposed to be funny, maybe because it's just true? I find it a little obnoxious, myself. Surely there must be another way to do things? But who am I to mess with tradition.

If, as a manager, I have a resolution for 2008, I suppose that it would be to attain more managerial finesse. And by this term I mean, mastering the art of Looking Like I know Just What I am Doing at All Possible Moments of the Day. This goal would be a little for my employees' benefit, and a little for my own.

Managers, particularly when feeling overextended, tend to have limited brain capacity, leading to feelings of scatteredness and a resulting depletion of self-confidence. Depleted self-confidence can truly undermine one's managerial authority, which in turn could decrease managerial self-confidence even further, kickstart a total downward spiral for the manager and her employees both, and potentially lead to absolute anarchy. It would not be good.

A lot of deep breathing exercises seem to be necessary in achieving this goal, as well as a deliberate slow-down in thinking. Harried situations must be assessed with a discriminating eye, broken down into steps, and the steps carried out in proper order to reach a resolution. For example:

Harried Situation=Manager spent inordinate amount of time this afternoon watching motivational training videos with Employee A, reading through training materials, serving Employee B a meal and encouraging him to go on break, sorting through company mail, testing newly received white noise machine for office environment, locating lost office supplies for Employee A, pondering Employee A's recent dress code rebellion, encouraging (unsuccessfully) Employee A to go on break, assisting Employee B with possible GI issues, not to mention fielding a VIP phone call, all the while intending to plan a company dinner and postponing the process until just minutes before the CEO's scheduled arrival.

Step 1 to Resolution=Pour self glass of wine.
Step 2: Pick up Employee A, who is a broken record stuck on the word "up."
Step 3: Pull up allrecipes.com, query "pork chops."
Step 4: Prepare bottle for Employee B, prop up on office chair.
Step 5: Briefly peruse recipes, decide they are all too hard, and/or too time-consuming.
Step 6: Glug wine.
Step 7: Greet the CEO, announce brightly that he will be grilling, and won't that be fun!
Step 8: Dump a bunch of BBQ sauce over pork chops.
Step 9: Indiscriminately grab a grain from the shelf and a veggie from the freezer for side dishes, begin cooking as though had it planned all along.
Step 10: Set table.

Bonus Step=Move dirty pots and utensils to sink before sitting down at table.

Resolution=Enjoy lovely, well-balanced meal in company of the entire Lo. Co. Staff. Tell self, See? It's a breeze. Finish wine.

I believe with some effort, this goal for 2008 is within my reach.