A Little Respect Please

I like to think that I'm a fair person when it comes to making judgements about people, issues about man management and that if somebody gets a bollocking then when things turnaround they should also get the benefit of praise.

Last week I had the opportunity to review the work of somebody who will be under my control from next January and I was very impressed, so impressed that not only did I tell him I actually went to my boss and told him. It was quite a comical moment because my boss loathes the person in question and would love to see the back of him and as he sat listening to my comments he began tearing at a pile of post-its in his hand, I told him Freud would have had a field day with psychoanalysing that moment - the mention of this persons name accompanied by frantic tearing of bits of paper, but I felt praise was the right thing.

Compare that with what happened on Tuesday when I ask a member of staff to do something only to hear, about five minutes later, her asking another member of staff to do it because she was 'too busy.' Unfortunately I was in a meeting at the time and couldn't do anything about it, however once I'd come out of the meeting I told her that if I asked her to do something I didn't expect it to be passed on. Imagine how I felt an hour later when I discover that she hadn't retrieved the job at all but had left it to the person she'd asked to do it. I didn't have a problem with somebody else doing it, the fact that she was supposed to do it seemed to be completely beyond her reasoning. I was then out of the office for two days and return on Friday to discover that this particular member of staff had decided to take a days holiday without telling me, despite the fact that I had arranged work to come in for her on Friday!

It's weird when the world turns upside down and the most reliable suddenly become the least reliable and vice versa!