You know I rarely scold my subordinates nowadays, the team leaders especially. But I just let fly a pretty long and nasty email to the 8, lambasting them for their lack of urgency and a lacksidaisical attitude towards some of my instructions.
And as I sit here, having simmered down considerably, I feel guilty.
Its always like that. I blow my top then feel that I shouldn't have said some things that could have hurt people afterwards. But sadly, words cannot be eaten. Although you wish that you could blend the sentences into some kind of puree and proceed to suck them up with a straw =))
Hiazz but what to do. These people give me an aneurysm sometimes.
I have 4 boys and 4 girls. All in their mid to late twenties. OK not really boys and girls
per se but hell they behave like teenagers occasionally. And I depend on them to help me manage a team of 200. If it were a one-man show with
moi at the helm, I would have been admitted to an asylum ages ago =))
I am not much older at 33. And sometimes there is this precarious tight-rope of trying to be a boss and a friendly peer at the same time. Is this even possible I wonder.
So during meetings, we would alternate between talking about operations and the latest movie or hip place to hang-out. Or we would bitch and gossip over kopi about our problematic
chewren, the little rascals that we manage lah, after the serious discussions are out of the way.
And you know I try to empower instead of overpower. I am not the power-hungry bastard some people make me out to be =)) I want them to use their god-given brains, be pro-active with solutions to problems, to think out of the box, to make their own intelligent decisions but to be prepared to answer for those decisions if they turn out to be stupid.
But sometimes I feel they want to be over-powered with micro-managed spoonfeeding instead. I swear its the way most Singaporeans are brought up. Big Daddy must tell me what to do in case I screw up so HE can answer for it.
As a friend I want to empower. But in times like this, I have to be the mean boss that overpowers.
I will bitch about the differences between boys and girls as leaders, the way I see it, some other time. That's another controversial story my 4am brain cannot manage for now =))