Go online and you’ll find thousands of managing tips. There is no short supply. A lot of them are very good and valuable, but most are common sense.  Blogs will tell you hundreds of easy solutions to minor conflicts with employees. It’s almost as if being a manager is so simple that it must have been mastered long before the internet blessed us with its crowd-sourced archives of knowledge.

So, why do I still have a hard time being a manager? Why do I still find challenges with employees to be terribly difficult? These thoughts bring up other questions: What are my motivations for keeping employees and what are my motivations for letting them go? When is the right time to let an employee go? These are the questions I couldn’t seem to find answers to in the trade of float therapy, where heart, integrity and caring make up the foundation of our business.

This is the part of the post where I could go over all the details of my time with a former employee who had just put in her two weeks’ notice at the writing of this article months ago. There were many miscommunications, unspoken conflicts, and actual conflicts. It was a challenge which lasted a very long time and took quite a bit of investment of time, energy, thought, patience, and heart. But, I don’t think the details are actually that important. What’s important is that it could have gone better. [Read more…] about Hard Truths of Being a Manager