How to: Manage passionate and emotional employees
Nancy Marshall
When I was in my 20s, fresh out of Colby College, I was even more full of ideas and energy than I am now. I came to work every day brimming with new ideas on how to make things better, sell more and do more. For those of you who know me now, that may be hard to fathom. Back in the 1980s, I worked for a group of men who were in their 40s and 50s, and although I did not know it at the time, they just didn't know what to do with me.
I had a friend who had grown up on the Maine coast in Harpswell who called me “notional.” In her best Downeast accent, she would say, “Oh yes, Nancy, you are full of notions. That brain of yours never stops churning.”
If those boss-men wrote the employee procedures and told me to do X, I would always want to do X-plus, which didn't always please them. They were just looking for X, after all. If they gave me three packages to sell, I would want to create a fourth package because that was what the client wanted. They were not set up for the fourth package, just the first three.
I basically drove management nuts, but I was passionate, I was committed, I was hardworking and I wanted desperately to succeed in my career. If they had only known how to harness my energy. I just needed someone to understand that I wasn't a rabble-rouser, I just had a lot to contribute! Little did they know that 30 years later it would be my passion and enthusiasm for my work that would be the hallmarks of my public relations firm and the message I try to send to young students and entrepreneurs.
Here are my five tips for dealing with 'notional' employees.
- Don't take a perfectly marvelous, wonderful, motivated and passionate employee and strip him or her of all her emotions and passion in order to fit a round peg into the job description or organizational chart. Do not shame them with sarcastic remarks in front of others for being emotional, or passionate or even loud. If you have to remind them to use their “inside voice,” that's OK, but do so with love. A callous word will be remembered forever.
- Teach them how to create a “bullet journal.” Hand the employee a beautiful blank book and show them how, or show them the website, bulletjournal.com, on how to create a system to log and organize ideas. Help them learn when and where it is time for creativity and when they need to follow the standard operating procedures. Tell them you appreciate their creativity but that there are times they need to follow the pre-established rules.
- Assign them the job of leading and facilitating problem-solving sessions for the entire staff. Give this person the job of standing up and showing how their creativity can become useful in solving some of the company's greatest roadblocks or issues. Give them a budget (it doesn't have to be huge) to buy some creativity whack packs or creativity putty to help get the juices flowing.
- Reward the behavior you want. If you are seeking conformity on a certain task and your notional employee conforms to a norm and completes that task, give them another blank book to write down ideas. Commend them in front of the group. And if it's creative ideas you're getting when you ask for them, then thank your employee and think of how much it would have cost to pay a Madison Avenue ad agency for that same idea.
- Communicate, communicate, communicate. Show that you care. If you want this person to succeed as part of your team, then tell this person how you feel about their work on an ongoing basis. Don't complain to others behind their back. It will get back to them in a hurtful way.
Nancy Marshall is known as The PR Maven and is the author of 'PR WORKS!' She owns and operates Nancy Marshall Communications in Augusta. She can be reached at nmarshall@marshallpr.com
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