Hi,
As a HR Officer, have a situation with a small salon team, only 3, whereby the dynamic is not working and despite one to one individual (and one group) meeting to attempt to encourage communication and address certain situations, the Manager of this team is now suffering from anxiety. We are an SME, and are under alot of pressure individually and collectively as is everyone else at the moment, so we want to support her as well as needing a leader for this team to be able to cope with all the demands right now. She feels undermined by her team and is in tears most days. Does anyone have advice on what to do next please? I have a meeting with her next week, I want to suggest some more conflict resolution, although we have already tried a lot of this whilst offering her support and reaching my Directors expectations of what is needed from everyone right now. A lot of conflict resloution advice is from the point of view of the manager managing this in her team, but here there is a lack of collaboration from thr team to the manager.
Any help would be appreciated, thanks, Jane
Replies
Hi JANE HAWKINS
So are we talking about getting feedback/input from the team to investigate the issues? If so, have you considered Crawford's slip writing method It'll give anonymity to the team, which could help you find out what's really going on but some team members could see the anonymous nature of the method as an opportunity to unleash their opinion on an already stressed manager. So you would be better placed than me to make that judgement.
Alternatively, is the nature of the undermining something that could warrant disciplinary action? I'm not a big fan of imposing rules on people to get them to behave in a particular way, but if this situation has gone to the point where nothing else will work, then it could be an option?
We could consider what support the manager needs. I hate to see employees put under stress. Would some kind of training help them?