Just a few days ago, I finally had "the talk" with my boss's boss. I was going to be an acting manager for my employer, covering a few different sites. This boiled down to three basic guidelines, which can be summarized as follows.
The rules favor the employee.
You have to accept your team will have a range of competencies. You have to work with them unless they are completely incompetent.
If you are trying to get something done, ask the employee open ended questions. If they still do not get it, then tell them what to do.
In the interest of full disclosure, we are in the USA and in a state that benefits unions. It is not that I completely disagree, but I think we can make this better for everyone (employees, stakeholders and managers included).
First, the rules may favor the employees, but management has a few things on their side. We have high salaries for relatively safe jobs. There are a lot of people who would love to move into PLCs, automation and controls, all of which make it regularly known they want to come over. Unless an employee picks unique skills and management fails both to train back-up staff and find integrators who can cover for them, management has some leverage. With the right training and documentation, you can make a guy with two years of experience act like a guy with five, or your gal with five act like a gal with twenty.
Second, I agree. Moreover, management cannot expect anyone to care about this company like themselves, let alone the owners. Companies need to set reasonable expectations about employees. Nick Huber, of the Sweaty Startup website and podcast, goes into this and the prior point, in detail. It is human nature. Why should an hourly employee care about margins? It would be silly to think they could.
Third, I partially agree. Employees should be expected to have some troubleshooting skills and this should be reflected in their salaries. If you are making $30/hour, I expect more from you than the guy making $15/hour and dramatically less than the woman making $60/hour. However, management needs to give them some guidelines on how to act and have intermediaries help employees to make the right decisions.
Let us go through the short version.
Push for cabinet drawings
Document procedures: specifically, inventory, troubleshooting, purchasing
Training on employee's weaknesses
Backup of critical systems
Does that sound familiar? (I thought so.) I might check in after the temporary position is over to show how this went. Wish me luck!
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