(Published July 21, 2008)
My client "Tim" is a very nice man who is a very bad manager. He knows it, which is why he hired me. But he has not yet learned that part of being a good manager is giving clear instructions.
Tim and a couple of his employees will be leading several groups of customers to a national event connected to his business. The plane tickets were bought last winter, and the tickets for at least one of the groups (each group is going to a different city) were paid for in full last March. The remaining groups had a deposit placed and the balance paid last month.
"Sarah," one of Tim's employees, was responsible for seeing that all the final arrangements were handled. Sarah has only been working for Tim for a couple of months, so much of the arrangements had already been made before she started. This week it was discovered that Sarah's predecessor had, for the group that was paid in full last March, bought more nonrefundable tickets than were actually needed. Tim is holding Sarah responsible. Nothing that Sarah could have done would have changed that cost to Tim, even if she had somehow miraculously discovered the error on her first day of employment. The day after the tickets were bought, it was too late to fix it with no cost to Tim. Tim, however, is convinced that if Sarah had found the error at any time up to a month ago, he would not have been charged. The travel agent supports Sarah, but Tim refuses to hear anything but his own opinion.
Additionally, Tim is convinced that he gave Sarah instructions that, if she had followed them, would have allowed her to find the error long ago. He has told me precisely what he told Sarah and I have to say, if he had given me those instructions I would have done precisely what Sarah did. It would never have occurred to me, based on what he claims he had said, to do what he wanted Sarah to do. The way he worded the instructions, I would have thought, just as Sarah thought, that he only wanted confirmation as to who was attending the event, not whose ticket he was paying for.
Slowly Tim, Sarah, and I, with the help of the travel agent, are getting the issue squared away. We may be able to get Tim a credit, even though a refund is impossible. But the bottom line issue, in my opinion, is not who should have done what, or who made the error, or how it gets fixed, but the importance of issuing clear instructions.
Sarah tells me that she tried to ask questions to clarify what Tim wanted her to do, and that he cut her off, telling her, "Just do it." Since I have heard him give those exact instructions to other employees, I have no question that he gave them to Sarah.
The employee who actually made the mistake is no longer working there, but after going through the paperwork (not all of which was available to Sarah until this past week), it's fairly easy to track how the mistake occurred. And if I were a betting woman, I'd bet that it was made for the same reason: unclear instructions from Tim.
As managers, it is important for us to make clear what it is that we want our reports to do. As HR managers, we have an additional responsibility: We sometimes have to teach the other managers how to manage, which includes teaching them the necessity of providing clear instructions and how to do it. They need to learn both; otherwise, we'll end up dealing with the employees after the fact, just as I've been dealing with poor Sarah.
So, how do you make sure your instructions are clear? There's no one single guaranteed way and the same way will not always work in all situations. But when possible, I like to write them down, step by step, and then review them to see if there is any step that could be read more than one way. Better to clarify it then, rather than after the job is half done, or worse, completely done!
It's a shame Tim didn't do this with the long-gone employee last winter — it would have saved him some money. It wouldn't have saved him any money had the instructions he gave Sarah been clearer, but at least he would have known a month sooner and might have been able to mitigate his damages. As things stand now, he's out several hundred dollars and he has an employee who's afraid to act independently, which is unlike Sarah.
Use a little Windex® on your thoughts as you give them to your employees and see what results you get!
Catherine Bannon is an HR consultant in Marshfield, MA (catherine.bannon@gmail.com). Bannon worked for 10 years in HR management before starting her consulting practice.
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