Welcome to Manager Tools. Today's show How to Manage a Discrettled non-promoted direct. Part 2. Here we go. So Mark, last week you concluded our show by saying professional managers have to be better

than this, right?

This idea of treating people poorly, right? This idea of treating people poorly, right?

Yeah, I don't think that's what a manager would say, right?

He wouldn't say I'm treating him poorly.

He's saying, I'm being proactive about my responsibility of the organization.

I have reason to believe this person is going to work against me,

therefore I have to treat them differently.

And what we've learned the hard way watching hundreds of managers,

thousands of managers over the years is that the managers

who start looking for people who are working against them, particularly if you're a brand

new manager, you will misread things that are normal, that are within the realm of

normalcy relative to the tension that always exists between managers and directs.

You know what I mean?

You know how often at client sites we end up having discussions about,

hey, tension is normal, conflict is normal, right?

And there's going to be some conflict. There's no balance, there's only some sort of dynamic

tension.

And so the big problem that managers have has come to us with a

question, what do I do differently? And the answer is, of course, is that's the wrong question.

I know you don't do anything differently differently and the moment you start thinking you need to do something

differently and you look for the spot rather than the sheet, you start seeing the spot.

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