Roy Tang

Someone on quora asked:

As a boss, what makes you mad at an employee?

I’ve not been a boss, but I have needed to manage/oversee the work of other people on the team.

The most frustrating things are behaviors that make it difficult to manage the person or to be aware of their progress.

We had this team member once who wouldn’t give regular progress updates of where she was on her tasks, even after repeatedly being asked to do so. It probably wouldn’t be a problem if she was always up-to-date, but she was consistently missing deadlines and many times we would ask her “where is item XXX, it’s due tomorrow?” only to get a response of “oh, was that important? Sorry, I haven’t done it yet”. If you are having trouble with your work you should be responsible enough to report problems early so that adjustments can be made by other people if necessary.

A second problem that would be annoying (and kind of related to the same employee above!) is saying you’ll do something and then not doing it. Or committing to something then not doing it. The same employee above was told that we needed to monitor her progress more closely since it was critical so we asked her to send progress updates regularly but she never did!