by meglesnick | Apr 13, 2026 | Culture, Leadership, Management, Talent, Uncategorized
Understanding Inconsistent Management
When you think about inconsistent management, you could look at it two ways. One is about inconsistency in the way that you treat individuals and the other is how managers across an organization can be inconsistent with their methods.
I’d like to start this off with saying that I believe in some inconsistency, meaning you don’t have to treat every employee or peer (or supervisor for that matter) exactly equal. You don’t and quite honestly you can’t. This is where business and management is more of an art and there is some grey. My point in this area is that there are people who thrive when managed differently in terms of items like how they learn best, what types of opportunities are they searching, do they prefer to have closer interactions with their co-workers, what type of communication style works best for them, do they like public or private recognition, etc. As you can tell, it isn’t one size fits at all.
Where Inconsistency Becomes a Problem
But, if you are cognizant of what employees prefer and you do your best to mind that for one person, you need to do that for everyone else on your team. If you don’t, you ARE being inconsistent. Managers are often concerned they’ll be labeled as having favorites. Some individuals are easier to get to know or even easier to recognize or promote, which doesn’t mean that we should all take the easy route, but it does mean that is a fact and a good hands-on leader will do their best to draw the most out of all employees or peers.
The important part is to do the same for everyone. You have regular one on ones with everyone you supervise, you take the time to give the entire group actionable feedback regularly, you work with everyone on their short and long-term goals. You take the role of manager seriously and remove barriers for all employees, help them solve problems, ask their opinions on items that they specialize in and give all of them the opportunities to advance, when possible.
Does this mean that you will have the exact same impact on each person? Absolutely not. Some individuals want or need this more than others and that is OK. You are trying your best for everyone, even with limited time and resources.
If you don’t supervise anyone, you can still treat others with consistency. Again, it doesn’t mean you have to use the same conversation starters for everyone in your group or offer help to every single person in your department. It means that you have positive intent for everyone, and you attempt to be a thoughtful, engaged peer to all, even the co-worker who doesn’t talk to you as much or the one you think is interested in taking over your job.
Organizational Consistency and Moving Forward
As for the other consistency point, if you go up a skosh to look at the organization more globally, often you’ll see the way that a department or division manager supervises their team can be quite a bit different from another manager. In fact, that’s normally the case as we are all human, and we don’t have the exact same strengths and weaknesses as each other. But it may mean more to you when items like promotions or benefits seem to favor other groups. This can often feel uncomfortable and certainly unfair.
Understanding that people have their own styles and ways of operating makes it easier to accept that there are differences. However, true inconsistency points to a lack of communication, training and robust systems. If you are part of an organization where this occurs, you can try to be part of the solution, rather than only pointing out the issues. It can be tough to navigate but certainly worthwhile. It’s essential in relationships to foster predictability and alignment.
by meglesnick | Mar 2, 2026 | Culture, Leadership, Management, Talent, Uncategorized
In my last blog post, I wrote about why it’s important to help those you supervise to build an internal network for their own development and also to increase collaboration within the workplace. I have an example which could illustrate this concept more fully.
When Expertise Isn’t Enough: The Challenge of Working Without a Network
I had an employee report to me in an odd position. She was the only project manager in our company as we were small and growing. Lots of people had interest in project management but she had been formally trained and working in the field for years. She came in to try to help out with a large and cumbersome project that had merit but was lagging in progress. As I was very supportive of the hire, our president decided I would be her manager.
She had a lot of great skills but didn’t know anyone and while most people at the company were fairly friendly, they stuck together in their departments. Salespeople talked to other salespeople. The financial team hung out together. My marketing group was a little more adventurous but that didn’t really help the project manager as she worked with everyone in the company a bit, but not any one group a lot.
Influence Is Built, Not Assigned: Helping Connections Take Root
I noticed that she was having some trouble getting answers or understanding the process of how the company worked. Even though I was helpful and the president was behind her, she was floundering a bit as she had no network. And, at the point that I interceded, she really didn’t see the point of why she needed one. People just needed to listen to her!
I think we’ve all been there where we wished we had more influence. It’s not easy to build it quickly and it doesn’t come only from a title or from our expectations. Co-workers need to want to spend time with you or know what they will get out of it. Can you make my life easier? My job less painful? Can you provide me with less to do, not more to do? One of the problems that the project manager had was she was assigning work to people with little regard for what they actually had on their plate and she didn’t have a great sense of how everything got done.
Since I had worked there for a few years, I knew the players and how things worked. I was able to help her make sense of the process flowed there, some of it being fairly productive and other parts of it a bit archaic. But all of it was reality and there were those individuals who could help her greatly and there were those who probably wouldn’t be as open to change.
As her manager, I listened to what she wanted to achieve and gave her insights into some staff members who held positions more like her. I introduced her to the ISO quality committee who were very interested in good process and making things better within the company. She found an inter-departmental group who she felt like she belonged to, which helped.
I also asked her to share her knowledge with several employees who wanted to know about project management. We had an informal mentoring team and she worked with staff in all different areas who started speaking the same language that she did and infiltrated all departments so if she needed someone to participate, then she now could readily find a volunteer.
In addition, she spoke at a couple of our monthly all staff meetings. I coached her to not give everyone the benefit of her giant Smart Sheet library but instead to give a short overview of her latest projects, the timeline and the results, including kudos to those who had surpassed their goals.
The Leadership Ripple Effect: How Internal Networks Strengthen Everyone
In less than a year, she was well established at the company and was looked to as a leader within the organization. The president was trying to determine if she should run her own PMO or if project managers should live within technical departments. It was definitely a success story for her.
And it was for me and the company as well. Honestly, she didn’t stay all that long as she had other ambitions to strike from her list, but she did positively touch a number of people in the company and made it easier for our president to figure out his direction.
The point is though that helping facilitate others to find their own networks is a positive method to show true leadership and make others and your company better and more cohesive.
by meglesnick | Jan 20, 2026 | Culture, Leadership, Management, Talent, Uncategorized
There are many jobs within the job of being a manager. You’re expected to teach, train, coach, mentor, support, explain, understand, give, direct, instruct, etc. It can be a lot, especially when you have multiple direct reports plus your own full-time job, as many companies add on management to an already at capacity individual.
The Many Hats of Management
But one part of the job that doesn’t get a lot of press is how to help your direct reports become known at the company on their own. You can do this in a variety of ways, by providing them internal recognition, by giving your boss insight to their performance, by promoting them at team meetings, by giving them the opportunity to lead other types of efforts, etc. These are all great ways of providing positive exposure while allowing others to see your employee’s talents.
Visibility Matters: Helping Employees Be Seen
Another idea is to help them figure out who to have as a professional network within the company and outside for them to do their jobs better and even potentially get promoted. This can be risky for some leaders as this could mean they will leave you and your department. This individual who you’ve come to depend on and have poured a lot of effort into may take these hard-won skills and go, maybe within the company or worse, leave as a highly prized recruit for someone else.
Letting Go of Fear: Networking, Growth, and Leadership Ego
GULP – that isn’t what you want, or is it? There are no guarantees that any of us will stay anywhere and we certainly don’t owe it to our bosses to stay put and not learn more or move up. You need to remember that this isn’t about you, not really. A good leader does all the verbs (teach, train, mentor…) because that is what you are supposed to do and if you’re fortunate enough to work with someone who really gets it, soaks it in and asks for more. Well, then they could leave their current position or even – surpass you! Can your ego take it?
I hope so, because helping employees build a good network is another way of providing them with more tools and these tools will greatly help them. They’ll help you too as employees who have positive workplace relationships will make sure that the department’s work gets done more efficiently and with more collaboration.
How do you do it? It isn’t hard really if you have regular conversations with those you supervise. If you are a little higher up in the organization, or have been there longer, or even are observant about what’s going on and who’s doing it, you can help guide your employees towards others who they can commiserate with, learn from and in general count on.
Helping your direct reports network and find their own spot within the organization is a great way to manage and mentor. While it certainly benefits employee growth and development, you can also increase your leadership expertise. It also benefits the organization and its health!
by meglesnick | Oct 23, 2025 | Innovation, Strategy, Uncategorized
Have you worked somewhere where the powers that be say that they are looking for new ideas? Or there is an “Innovation Committee”? Or even giving employees cash for something new?
Innovation is an important part of the workplace. New products and services often keep an organization viable into the future. It isn’t always the leadership team who comes up with the latest thoughts and in fact, it’s normally the engineers, the product managers, the customer service team, those who work in the field or with the customers who think of items that will satisfy customers and solve issues.
It isn’t always the new product though or the new service that should be prized. A closely related topic is when people figure out a new way to solve a problem or enhance a process. These ideas don’t usually get the bonus or the recognition, but they should.
Ways to Encourage Innovation in the Workplace
Wouldn’t our companies be better served if we encouraged our employees to look for new ways to solve old issues? There are lots of ways that we could do this:
- Look through the complaints that the company gets. This is an easy way to use customer feedback to try to fix items. I’d encourage you to affinitize these complaints and look at any patterns that seem larger. You could also categorize them by ease of improvement to get a few wins under your belt before you go after something bigger.
- If you don’t keep complaints or they’re not easy to find, you can survey your customers and find out what they would like to have fixed. It can be where you focus on the lowest performing quantitative items or you can look at the qualitative comments and again, try to affininitze them so you aren’t reacting on each individual idea.
- You can also survey your internal team to see what they are hearing. At times, this can be more problematic because there is bias from employees as they may remember the last thing they heard or they may be interested in giving more difficult to work with problems lower marks, but it is a way to query. You could combine the internal team output with the customer survey as well.
- If you work somewhere where you have staff that fixes or catalogues problems, this is another area to investigate, such as service, quality, customer service, etc. You may notice for example, that there is volume in a certain product being returned and there could be a flaw there that hasn’t been fixed.
- There are also other types of improvement opportunities, such as in a process. You could check and see if there are SOPs for what is done within the organization. If there aren’t any or most processes aren’t documented, that is a great place to begin as you can often see what doesn’t make sense once documentation occurs and others are reviewing it. If your processes are documented, then having others quality check them to see if they are easy to follow or if there are other ways perhaps to do something. There may be ways to automate for example or another group to handle something or a more efficient method.
- You could determine the biggest bottlenecks in your department (or time killers or things that no one likes to do, etc.) and have a facilitated brainstorming sessions on other ways to handle these items.
- There are a lot of quality tools an organization can use in order to become more productive and it’s a great opportunity for others to expand their knowledge and lead a team. These quality tools could be used in a department or division meeting which is a great use of the group’s knowledge, an opportunity for a member of the department to shine within a group setting, a way to improve and innovate and a way to bring multiple perspectives together in a positive manner. You could have people think of a way to do something better within the group and rank them in order of which would make the biggest impact.
The idea here is that innovation and improvement can come in many shapes and sizes and all should be celebrated. Bringing a new product or service to launch is a giant achievement and is worthy of a lot of time and energy. Process improvements also are another form of innovation that help us meet and exceed business goals.
by meglesnick | Sep 28, 2025 | Leadership, Management, Strategy, Uncategorized
Mastering Delegation in Management: Why It’s So Hard to Let Go
One of the more difficult challenges in management is learning to delegate appropriately, especially when you have a similar skillset to the people you supervise. How many times have we all said that sometimes it is way easier to do something, rather than having to explain that “thing” to someone else. It can be faster, more productive and you can have a better outcome if you take care of the tasks and don’t bother explaining to others how to do it well. It happens with various types of items, ranging from communication to project management to technical tasks.
But we all know that a manager shouldn’t/couldn’t do the work of an entire department. Plus, if you don’t help others understand the way to get things done, you’ll never have a well-rounded staff. Lastly, who says you are the authority of “everything”? Often your way is good, but it isn’t the only way to go. It’s one of the reasons why we often try to hire people with some diverse skills and experience as different sources can equal better outcomes.
Why Managers Struggle to Delegate Tasks
There’s lots of reasons why we don’t delegate – it can be easier, or we don’t think that those on our team have the expertise. Maybe we truly are the expert and can see the best path to completion. Or we don’t have the time – there is a deadline to meet that can’t be moved.
Isn’t it the job of a manager to guide and mentor others without actually doing all of the work of the department? How will you ever have a high-functioning team if you don’t let go a bit? But how/when/why?
Managing Different Strengths Across Your Team
Let’s face it, sometimes you have staff members who aren’t created equal. You may be able to trust employee #1 with all her duties but employee #2 has to be monitored regularly or he’ll cause a dust up with other employees or can make small, but critical mistakes. Sometimes we can spread work around our department and play to our staffs’ strengths and sometimes…not so much.
You could even look at your own strengths and find that your strengths are way different than others on the team. Maybe no one can put together and deliver a key presentation the way that you do. Or perhaps no one on your team has the negotiating skills that you do. Then there could be the difficult internal politics that your team hasn’t quite mastered, sometimes leaving you with more of a mess to clean up.
From Star Performer to Empowering Leader
If any of this sounds familiar, join the club! Often, once you reach the role of manager, it’s because you have an impressive skillset, usually better (in some areas) than those of your team. It is your responsibility to help your team out and build on their fledgling skills. Remember back in the day when your first presentation wasn’t rock solid, or you made mistakes in analyzing data? Maybe you still do but you’re better at recovering.
You are doing the work of a hands-on leader when you guide someone else through experiences that you could take care of with no issue. You NEED others to be solid and you may always be the rock star, but others can learn and maybe even surpass you in some areas. This is good for you, them, your team and the company in general.
I used to work with a peer who was an all-around good performer. He was able to write, design, administer a website, craft a video and in general communicate well. He was in charge of a creative team which isn’t easy, normally filled with egos and agendas. This team was no different. However, instead of mentoring and motivating his team, he cherry picked the assignments as they came in. He took the “fun” stuff, leaving the mundane and low-profile work to the rest of the group. At times he was overwhelmed as he wasn’t very organized so he often took on more than he could handle. But he didn’t ask for help from his team or ask their input. Instead, he tried to soldier on, bitterly complaining to others about his heavy workload. As you can imagine, his employee satisfaction scores were abysmal with most of his internal clients either loving or hating him, depending on whether he was able to prioritize their needs.
This may sound unusual, but it’s not. The even more difficult part of this story is that his boss, a high-ranking leader within the company, didn’t acknowledge any of these problems or seem to work with him to solve them. The team who reported to the creative director was frustrated, bitter and left with no options. Some left the company. Others stopped trying as hard. It was a bad situation.
At the time, I tried to talk with the creative director, but he didn’t see the issue. He thought that it was his team’s fault. They were all jealous, he said. They weren’t a real team he continued to argue and all out for themselves. As an outside perspective, I told him that I didn’t see this as his team’s issue alone. Yes, I said, it isn’t the best solution when everyone is fighting but I said, didn’t he think that was his responsibility as well? He acknowledged that it was but claimed he was “too busy” to work on it. He wanted a team that offered solutions instead of reiterating the problem. No matter how I phrased it to him, he wasn’t talking about his opportunity to fix the problem.
Turning It Around: How to Improve Your Delegation Style
If you see yourself in the creative director example above, don’t worry. This can get fixed. You need to step back and determine your leadership style. Have you been told you don’t delegate? How do the one-on-one meetings go with your staff?
One big part of managing others is guiding them towards improving their strengths, giving them new opportunities, being there when they make a mistake and helping them become better. You’re not the very best at everything but you have a lot to give which is important. Having a strong team who can handle the work of the department is the best way to take on new, more interesting work and enable higher employee satisfaction.
by meglesnick | May 21, 2025 | Culture, Leadership, Uncategorized
The word “conflict” is one that most of us dislike, whether in the workplace or in our personal life. The word gets a bad rap maybe we should change the narrative around it and talk more about differences of opinion. We can’t all see things exactly the same way. It’s one of the reasons that different perspectives are so important. The background and ideas that I bring to work are very different from the ones that you have. Because of that, we will naturally have areas or subjects that we approach using a variety of various points of view. We don’t want to shy away from any of it, but rather embrace how we look at projects, problems, people and processes.
Reframing Conflict as Opportunity
One big part of it is to let go of the negativity that surrounds this concept. A lot of time you will see courses and books devoted strictly to resolving conflicts, among teams, peers, divisions, you name it. This implies that we wait until a conflict exists to try to tackle what happened. I would encourage all of us to be a bit more proactive.
It may not seem fair to always have to “manage” people but that is part of our job. Most of us don’t work on an island, where we can handle all aspects of what needs to get done. How you handle any sort of conflict is key to how well you succeed and how well your company succeeds towards its goals.
The Story of Joe and Pete: A Common Workplace Conflict
I remember clearly an instance where two individuals struggled regularly to work together peacefully. The company didn’t set them up well in terms of who they reported to, what they needed in order to be considered successful at their job and the number of tasks that they each had to accomplish in a day. Joe and Pete worked in sales and marketing.
Joe was an enterprising sales representative who never was able to be the top producer on his team, but he was always trying hard to close business. He didn’t have the best territory or the most support, but he had a lot of persistence and that served him well. Pete was a newer hire on the marketing team. He enjoyed producing more complicated and interesting marketing pieces, like white papers or annual reports. As he was the new guy, he was assigned to updating current pieces, which were mostly flyers and web pages. One of the ways that this company marketed to clients was by customizing the flyers for the sales team to help better target the products to specific industries or individuals. The process the company was using was a little old school, but it got the job done. Joe often wanted these customizations, and he sent his ideas to the marketing team regularly. Each of his emails got forwarded to Pete who was expected to answer each one of them. Pete wanted to figure out a different way to handle this process as this was becoming very time consuming and seemed inefficient. Plus, he couldn’t focus on this new project he was handed, which was a corporate brochure that the sales team had requested over a year ago.
As you can tell, Joe and Pete were headed for a conflict. Neither of them had tried to prepare in advance for this possibility and as the two of them had different bosses and in fact, completely different departments with separate leadership, they didn’t even share the same goals. It got messy. Because Joe was so focused on needing whatever he could get his hands on to help close his sale and Pete was so focused on making sure that the process was correct and he didn’t like his workload, they didn’t have much common ground. Sounds messy, doesn’t it? But kind of typical at the same time.
Building Systems to Support Collaboration
When you are involved in a leadership position at a company, you should be thinking about your staff, their interactions and how the “big picture” (aka goals, strategies, direction, reporting relationships, etc.) affects their daily life. There are several ways that the Joe and Pete situation could have been avoided. First, the head honchos for the sales and the marketing team could be more in alignment. This sentence sounds like it should be easy, but it can be difficult, depending on the organization structure. Oftentimes, how a department is funded can make a huge difference as to who has the power in the relationship. Besides budgeting, there are always important issues regarding the goals for the organization and who is responsible. If you make one department responsible without acknowledging other department support, you are not setting your company up well for collaboration. Then there are the actual office politics that occur – who’s closer to the CEO or COO? Is there some sort of a division in the ranks that gets played out further down the line?
Let’s say that these two departments are more functional, maybe not perfect, but at least somewhat aligned on what’s getting accomplished, who’s paying for it and who gets the accolades if it works and the blame if it doesn’t work. If that’s the case, then issues could arise at the supervision front. If Joe and Pete’s supervisors don’t recognize that this could be occurring and working together to try to help, then that’s a big part of the problem. In most workplaces, many of our staff have way more on their plates than they have time to accomplish it. Prioritization is the word that gets bandied about regularly. But who is doing the prioritization? And are we looking at what the company needs to accomplish when the prioritization occurs? Plus, if we think about it from an individual’s perspective, don’t we all naturally gravitate to the tasks that we prefer to perform, not necessarily what’s in the best interest of others or the company? Unless of course, that is embedded in the mindset of everyone – starting at the very top and working its way down to each level of the organization. Many of us probably empathize with Pete. The idea of being able to work on something creative, different, fresh is enticing. Having to continually update the same pieces, especially when you don’t have the context of their importance or results can be exhausting and more importantly uninspiring.
All of us need some level of motivation to get up everyday and get our jobs done. It isn’t just about the paycheck for us all of the time. The paycheck is of course important and necessary, but the idea of how our work matters and why it matters makes a big difference on how we view our jobs and our roles within the organization. If Pete knew that for Joe, these customized flyers ARE essential to his prospecting efforts and the more of these that he gets, the more likely he is to the opportunity to get his foot in the door. Joe doesn’t understand why he needs to tell Pete that because for him, he’s working so hard at following up, being persistent and providing custom information for each of his customers in hope that when they need something, they’ll call him first. Joe feels as though this is Pete’s job after all and doesn’t recognize that Pete has a lot of hats to wear, not just helping Joe.
In the end, the compromise that needed to occur was a systemic way for both to get what they wanted. It needed input from both and management hearing each of them to design a process where Pete can create the base document and Joe can use a system to update the area of text where he could customize the flyer for each of his customers. Now Joe is happy because he doesn’t have to wait for marketing (and Pete) to take care of this small task (in his mind) for him each time he needs the personalized flyers. And Pete is happier because he understands the importance of this task and felt like he did a great job with the various base copy flyers, which certainly took time, but he isn’t getting an email everyday asking for a tweak. In addition, management decided to do some analysis and tracking to see if these custom flyers result in added business. Lo and behold, they did and there is an actual dollar amount attached to them. This made both Joe and Pete feel better as Joe’s hunches were correct and Pete’s efforts helped the sales team. It’s the very definition of a win-win!
