This week’s question from our portal “Ask Us Anything” comes from Sean.
My business is going through a large amount of growth. We just onboarded three new employees and are very busy. I’m not sure what’s going on with me though—I began feeling rage and anger, because some of our people aren’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing. I’m trying to figure out what this feeling is. I think it’s my anxiety manifesting into anger.
The feedback given to me about my new employees is that things aren’t getting moved along. It’s frustrating. My immediate reaction is, “What the F? Why isn’t this stuff being done?” Everyone knows what they’re supposed to be doing. They have their goals and metrics.
These are time-sensitive projects, and I want to make sure we’re serving our clients. I’ve explained this to the team. But when we have our status meetings and updates, things aren’t getting moved forward. What’s going on here?
Part of this is, you feel out of control. Historically, control’s been the issue for you.
Ask yourself, what does that mean to you, to be frustrated by this? Where is it causing the problem other than your frustration?
Secondly, when you’re having a meeting—and things aren’t getting moved forward—are you actually having a conversation with the person responsible for moving their part forward?
Are you having a private conversation with the person whose responsibility is to get the movement and find out specifically and accurately what the problem is on their behalf?
You have to have that meeting and just find out what’s going on and what support you can provide to them.
Remember, this is also firing up something in you.
You don’t like confrontation. So, this is forcing you to have confrontation in a healthy way, not in a negative way, but in a communicative way.
It’s forcing you to have to deal with that again. And it’s something you don’t particularly like to do. You don’t have a good history with that, even going back into your family.
Understand what’s really making you angry, so that you can deal with it from a more sensible place when you’re having the conversations.
You definitely want to have the conversation. You don’t want to go down that road of not saying anything at all.
You need to find out why the work isn’t being done. You can’t solve the problem if it stays in your imagination and you don’t know. Let’s find out what the problem is, and then we’ll take it from there.
