“Refuse to be undermanaged”-
Insist on getting the direction, guidance, and support you need at work.
The following written content by Bruce Tulgan, JD
You show up at work one day and much of your job seems to be coming unglued: You have a voicemail from your manager telling you the project you worked so hard on for the last two weeks is all wrong. You think to yourself, “Well, I told you I didn’t have enough experience to take that task on!” Then you receive an email from a manager in another department, who is hounding you about “taking way too long” with yet another project—you need to get that to her “immediately.”
Meanwhile, you were planning on spending the morning finishing up one of your routine tasks—dotting some ‘I’s and crossing a few “t”s—but you received so many urgent emails, you figure you better answer them before you do anything else. Last week, the same scenario played out and you forgot to go back and dot the “I”s and cross the “t”s; in the end, the task had to be redone at the last minute. You ended up working very late that day and everybody was mad. You don’t want to do that again, so you’ve been trying to lay to stay out of everybody’s way. But now you have these managers messing with your day before it even starts!
What’s going on? You think of yourself as a high performer. But you start second-guessing yourself: “One manager tells me to do one thing. Another one tells me to do something totally different. How am I supposed to know what takes priority? How am I supposed to know what is up to me and what’s not? The bosses here don’t have any idea how to manage! Only the rarest of them ever spends enough time with me to give me the guidance I need or to make sure I have the resources to do the job or to help me problem-solve. Half the time, I don’t get any recognition for the work I do well, no matter how hard I work.” Read more from Psychology Today.
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