![\"Discouraged](\"https:\/\/staging-wmplo.xyz\/mark-c-divi5\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/images-13.jpeg\" "\\"Discouraged")
This post is my apology to a former and great employee of mine whom I now realize I led very poorly \u2013 all the while she worked feverishly to complete an important project for me.<\/p>\nThis post is my apology to a former and great employee of mine whom I now realize I led very poorly \u2013 all the while she worked feverishly to complete an important project for me.<\/p>\n
What makes me feel especially guilty about all this is that this employee, Kimberly, at one point really loved working for me.\u00a0\u00a0 She routinely called me \u201cMWB,\u201d an acronym for \u201cmy wonderful boss,\u201d and did a terrific job.\u00a0 Not only was the quality of her work generally exceptional, she was ambitious, proactive and got a lot of fantastic things accomplished before ever telling me she had taken them on.<\/p>\n
So why would I treat her badly \u2013 thereby frustrating her and dampening her spirit more and more in every subsequent interaction?<\/p>\n
Impatience.\u00a0 And more significantly, no acknowledgement of her efforts.<\/em><\/p>\n Here\u2019s what happened.\u00a0\u00a0 I asked Kim to develop a bank-wide marketing campaign for an important new initiative within our investment services business.\u00a0\u00a0 Not knowing exactly what I wanted, I relied on Kim to use her own creativity and propose how best to tackle the task.<\/p>\n Wanting to please me \u2013 but uncertain as my expectations \u2013 she poured herself into the project and developed a handful of potential options for me to consider.<\/p>\n Perhaps because she hadn\u2019t disappointed me in the past, I went into our meeting together with very high expectations.<\/p>\n Uncharacteristically, however, I disliked everything she presented and here\u2019s where I started to slowly lose the \u201cMWB\u201d moniker.\u00a0 I offered her no valuable guidance and just asked her to come up with something better.\u00a0 That was it.\u00a0 I don\u2019t like it; do better.<\/p>\n No one wants their boss to dislike their work and Kim worked especially hard for me to never find herself in that position.\u00a0 So, my being unhappy with her proposals was particularly discouraging.<\/p>\n But I also failed to acknowledge all of her effort \u2013 to express directly that I knew she had tried really hard to get it right.\u00a0 And that form of leadership malpractice sent her back to the drawing board far less motivated by the task.<\/p>\n Over a period of weeks, she made new recommendations.\u00a0 Not surprisingly, she never found the inspiration for the campaign and I grew palpably more impatient and unhappy each time we met.<\/p>\n I could make excuses for handling this all so badly (under stress, many other projects to manage, Seinfeld ended), but the truth is I lost perspective on the situation.<\/p>\n If I could turn back time, what I would have done differently was to have thanked Kim for all the time and effort she put into the initial proposals and to assure her that she still had my confidence.\u00a0 Thanking people for their effort \u2013 particularly when they don\u2019t get immediate results \u2013 is the surest way of inspiring the persistence it takes to accomplish a challenging goal.<\/p>\n I forgot that, Kim, and I\u2019m sorry.<\/p>\n