Venting vs. needing help, unmet expectations, and manager thrash: three real questions answered

Anytime someone comes to you venting or you know, with a problem asking the question, what do you need from me? How can I best support you? And then you figure out what course of action to take. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where I bring a decade of experience working in some of the most influential companies in tech to help you navigate the ins and outs of being a people manager from conflicts to feedback, to delegating and more.

We will leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it and everything in between. Doesn’t matter if you’re a new manager looking for some tips or a seasoned manager looking up their game. Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go. Today, I’m doing something kind of fun. We’ll see how it goes. I’m doing a AMA LinkedIn live, so I’ll be recording here and then post this as a podcast episode.

So tune in live and add your comments, questions, anything at the feed, and I will answer them real time. And I will just dive into three questions that I got over the last few weeks that I wanted to share. And I thought, well, these could each be their own episode, but I was really wanting to do another AMA kind of quick rapid fire. So well here we are. First question, how do I know if an employee is asking for help, wanting me to problem solve or just venting?

Now, how many times have we been in this situation? In our own relationships, even where someone comes to us and they’re talking about all this stuff and we’re like, you know what you need to do, or here’s some ideas. We ha I have, or you actually feel like now I gotta go solve this problem and maybe you take action and they’re like, uh, I was just venting. Or, I don’t need you to problem solve. I just want you to listen.

I just want you to be here with me. Well, the same thing happens with our teams. And this can be, it can be kind of an anxiety producing when a team member comes to you venting about something and feels like, well, I kind of need to solve this thing, and, and maybe you actually take action. And so as I thought about this question, I thought about when, when this actually happened to me, both as a manager and as an ic.

So I remember one time I came to my manager and I said, oh, one of my team members, she, she’s kind of getting stuck with these different things and we’re working through this. And I, I was just kind of venting, like that’s why it’s been a tough week for me. And my manager said, wait a second, is there something wrong with the product launch? Like, what’s going on? Let me follow up. And she just pounced on all the things that I had been saying and I actually was just venting.

I totally had it handled. And I realized at that moment that Kana should be a little bit more thoughtful about what I’m sharing. Right? Because now I had, I put up all a bunch of stuff on my manager’s radar that she thought that she had a run with. Now as that manager, I think it’s really important to ask the question, Hey, I wanna be most useful here. Are you venting? You wanna just kind of bounce ideas around or are you feeling stuck?

Do you act, are you asking me for help? And as I thought about this question more, I, I, I think we’ve all been in the situation where our manager actually sends an email, they follow up, maybe they don’t even mention they’re doing that, and it can be like, Hey, please don’t do that. My big tip here is if you’re not sure, well, let’s just say anytime someone comes to you venting or you know, with a problem asking the question, what do you need from me?

How can I best support you? And then you figure out what course of action to take. If they’re venting, then you, you listen, you hold space for them. You, you just, you’re there. You can say, ah, yeah, that’s frustrating. I think if they come to you venting continually, then that’s a pattern to be addressed of. Hey, are you feeling really stuck in your job? In general? Is there a team member that is, you know, you’re, you’re needing sort of support, figuring out how to work with them?

Are you feeling frustrated and venting? Cuz there’s a skill gap. So on the venting path, there’s actually quite a few things we can do to address it. If they’re asking you for help, now we can put that coaching hat on, right? Doesn’t mean we just jump in and solve the problem or send that email. We say, where are you feeling stuck? What have you tried? What, what has worked for you in the past? And then we can use some of these coaching skills to help them move it forward.

And then if they say, listen, I’ve tried everything. I just need you to send that email to my stakeholder. They’re not listening to me. I need a little bit of air cover. Then we do that, but we’ve really categorized what kind of action to take and then we can move forward. So that’s how we answer the first one, how to tell between if my team member is venting or needing help, or actually needing me to take action, and then what to do.

Second question is, how do I manage someone who’s not meeting expectations? This is the scariest, hardest part about being a manager, right? If everything’s going well, it’s smooth sailing, but when someone isn’t meeting expectations, now this is where we have to pull out all our skills. Now, the first thing I, I think is important to ask ourselves if someone’s not meeting expectations is, have I been crystal clear about what these expectations are? And I gotta say, I think there’s always more opportunity to make things more clear.

Saying, Hey, we’re we’re seeing a couple things missed. So giving some specific feedback saying, I wanna make sure we’re on the same page around what were the expectations we talked about. You’re working on this report. The expectation is you check in, midweek, share how it’s going. There’s an opportunity to give feedback, and then by the end of the week that it’s finished and we can share it with the client. Right? That’s very clear. Expectations both about how to check in on the way and then what done looks like.

I think we can also add what done looks like. In this report, we have to have the analysis, some questions, and next steps. So that’s really, wanna make sure you’re totally clear. That’s what success looks like. Here’s when we’re gonna check in and here’s when it has to be done. When we’ve set super clear expectations, that gives us something to hook onto when we’re giving feedback. So it’s really hard to say, you know, you’re, you’re missing the mark, and the person goes, well, what do you mean?

I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be doing. So when someone’s not meeting expectations first, we gotta really set, reset, get so, so crystal clear so that you’ve had this kind of two-way conversation. You know exactly what that person’s supposed to be doing. I think it can be really helpful to follow up with an email saying, Hey, here’s what we talked about in our meeting. These were the expectations. This is what done looks like. This is what I’m, you know, I’m expecting to see by the end of the week or whenever.

Because that, that email, that understanding is gonna be necessary. If you have to keep doing that kind of email, then that creates something to refer back to if you ever need the documentation, all things like that. But you do have to give someone sufficient time to course correct one warning and saying, oh, this person’s outta here. That doesn’t give that person any time to figure it out. We wanna give some warning. We wanna say, Hey, are you, are you getting stuck?

Do you need support? Do you need coaching? Is there a skill gap? Is there, you know, do you wanna shadow someone? Kind of see how this goes. And then I think it’s okay to say what’s at stake if someone’s not meeting, meeting expectation, saying, Hey, this is the third time we’ve gotten this wrong. I’m gonna need to team you up with someone to figure out this piece until you can run with it on your own. Or I’m gonna have to take you off this kind of project, or whatever it is, so that they understand this is serious and they have to really step it up.

But the expectations allows you to give feedback, not meeting. It’s like, do they even know what those are? And then running with it from there. Again, this is really hard and it can be really frustrating, especially frustrating when you feel like you’ve said these things already, but when you get to a point where you’re like, Ugh, I don’t, I don’t think this person’s cutting it anymore. That’s a really important moment to go back, slow down, approach this very, very intentionally think, Hey, I want to share where you’re at.

These are the expectations. Here’s feedback. Be very specific, and then say what you wanna see. Third question in our ama, and again, please send anything in the comments and I can address that as well. Is. What’s the toughest situation you’ve dealt with as a manager? Thank you. Person who sent this one in? Uh, I had to think about this. I think a lot of stuff is tough. I don’t know if this is the toughest, but I, I thought about what’s a really hard, hard experience I had as a manager and that was joining a team where I was managing I think four or five people and they had had three or four different managers in the last year.

And they’re like, great. And another revolving door of managers. And they looked at me as like, whatever, who cares? This person’s not, person’s not gonna be able to help me. This was a tough dynamic to enter into because you come in, they’re excited and like, Hey, I’m ready to go. Let’s meet everybody, and people are like, yeah, we’ll see. What I did in that situation was not let that phase, we say, Hey, this is a new start.

I’m here to support you. Here’s how I view being a manager, that I’m here to amplify you and develop you and be a sounding board to, to figure out problems and help you reach your goals. I came in with, I don’t know about the past managers. I don’t know how they were. I know that’s a frustrating situation. Definitely held space shared. Yeah, this is a frustrating thing. I’m, I’m sorry that’s going on, and here’s how I’m gonna treat it differently.

So that they’d see, okay, we have a fresh start, we have a new opportunity to build a relationship. You do have to build that trust. You have to demonstrate that you’re invested in them. And this may take weeks, months. It, it can take some time. But the more you show up for your team, the more you make time to connect. Ask them about themselves. Ask them about their goals. Connect the dots between their goals and what you’re doing proactively saying, Hey, I know in our, in our one-on-one last week you talked about really wanting to get more visibility and public speaking, and so I think here’s a great opportunity I’d love you to take on to present in the team meeting.

By connecting the dots, you’re showing you’re listening, you’re showing you’re there, and you’re showing her to do something differently. I don’t think you need to make promises that you know I’m gonna be here forever. Don’t worry, it’s not gonna be a lot of change. We have no control over so much of this right now in the workplace. I like to say, you know, I don’t know what’s gonna happen when six months, 12 months, and more than that, but while I’m here, here’s how I will support you.

I think this is all we can do. If you inherit a team where there’s been a lot of change and people are jaded and frustrated, that’s the approach I take. I don’t know what’s gonna happen, future. Here’s how I can support you in really building that trust and helping people reach their goals while you’re there. I also think one thing that was challenging about this situation that I’m talking about was I joined right in the beginning of a performance cycle, so I had to deliver feedback from another manager and then talk about growth with someone.

I had no idea what the actual gaps were. That was a little bit sticky as well, and in that conversation, I said, here’s the feedback. I wanna get to know you myself. I wanna, I wanna figure out what, what I see as the gaps, and here’s some things that other people have addressed. Let’s talk about these. I’ll kind of talk about if I see the same things, and we’ll go from there. I also don’t think you have to carry forward another plan if it doesn’t end up being the thing that you see.

I’m really big on a fresh starts. The dynamic of people is, is a huge impact on how people work and show up. If a manager in a report really didn’t see eye to eye head, they had very different work styles, they had communication breakdowns, there can be huge, huge perceptions of not meeting expectations and different things. That show up very differently if you connect better with that person. Very adamant about giving someone a new chance. And the opportunity, I know I talk about this in another, another episode of the Unlucky, uh, situations episode on inheriting a, a Low Performer is that low performer was in that one situation.

Let’s see how they are with you again. I love your questions. Either send them through LinkedIn. Join my text list. My text list is a community where you can reach out directly to me, ask your questions directly. I will either answer them straight out or show ’em on a AMA. Or in an upcoming, I’ll just have a whole episode about it and I’m gonna be hosting q and a conversations on Zoom live real time where we can talk through these questions and do it a little bit of live coaching.

So you’re gonna wanna get on that list and to get on that list, you text the word MANAGER to 4 1 5 2 3 4 5 7 1 16 and again, goes right to me. So if you got a quick question you just wanna get answered, send me a text, 4 1 5 2 3 4 5 7 1 6. And I’ll answer it right there. Thanks for tuning in. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple Podcast where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.

I always love to hear from you, so please reach out at liagarvin.com or message me on LinkedIn. See you next time.