So I’m getting a promotion soon (yay!), moving up from just a line cook to sous-chef and I’ve only been with this company for a few months. Thing is that I’m still quite young (mid twenties) and will be the direct supervisor of some people a fair bit older than I am. Think 10-20 years older. It might just still be a bit of imposter syndrome, but the idea of having to tell people who have been in the business for far longer than I what to do and such really weirds me out.
I feel I wouldn’t like it if “some young brat” that just got hired almost immediately gets a promotion and becomes my supervisor eventhough I worked at the company for far longer. Though maybe not everyone feels like this.
Do other people who have experience with a situation like this have any advice on how to deal with this? It’s kinda been keeping me up at night…
Your first task is to identify who’s who, first by determining their sentiment towards you, who likes you, who’s indifferent, who hates you, if they hate, why…
Next, figure out their level of knowledge, who’s a fool, who’s a fool and thinks they’re smart, who’s truly smart and who’s smart but thinks they’re a fool.
With this map made, prepare your strategy. To start, don’t waste time on fools who hate you and the fools who flatter you, they’re a waste of time, but always treat them with respect, just don’t expend energy on them, as they usually sink themselves.
Treat those who are indifferent to you with respect and try to convert them into followers, showing that you understand their frustrations and problems that may make them uninterested in the work. But be careful not to become a psychologist.
Finally, regarding the people who like you, play it safe, subtly compliment them when you can, encourage their growth. If they’re the smart type who thinks they’re a fool, show them they have impostor syndrome and watch their morale boost. If they’re fools, understand why they’re fools, it might just be that they’re in the wrong position. But if it’s something worse, try to subtly keep your distance, so as not to turn a sympathetic fool into a new hater.
In conclusion, always treat people with respect, regardless of their position or age, remember that things change, tomorrow one of them could be your boss and you wouldn’t want to be humiliated because of revenge for something you did in the past.
Definitely agree, being respectful is the way to go especially if you have long wait til retirement or changing career fields. For some industries you will run into the same people over and over again. Try not to damage your reputation by forgetting that golden rule.
Also keep in mind that unless there’s some large incentive, a lot of older folks do not necessarily want to be in charge and have added supervisory “babysitting” duties. They just want to do their jobs and not be fkd with.
I think this is really bad advice. I’d do the opposite: don’t bother trying to figure out how anyone feels about you and don’t treat anyone differently if you do find out. Just be respectful to everyone, do your job, and try to make everyone successful. A leadership job is about making the whole team successful.
The job of a leader is to ensure that the work gets done, and for that, you need trustworthy people who won’t let you down because they think you don’t deserve the position.
It’s not wise to assign an important task to someone you know doesn’t have the capacity to do what’s asked, or worse, someone who knows how to do it, but deliberately does it wrong to harm you as a manager.
Someone’s competency isn’t defined by their opinion of you. I’ve been a manager for about 16 years, and the vast majority of my relationships with my employees over the years have been very positive - I’m friends still with many who’ve retired - but they didn’t always start that way. I still say making a good faith effort to help the team succeed, including each person on it, is the way to go, regardless of what you think of them as a person, or they you. That’s also how you end up getting the respect of everyone.
You’re right that not every person is right for every job, but that’s a completely different parameter. Most people are relieved when you avoid assigning them to things they aren’t good at unless it’s a stretch/development assignment. I’ve had exactly zero employees who intentionally did a crappy job in order to screw me. People generally aren’t like that unless you give them a significant reason to.
Perhaps it’s due to my past experiences, but in the company where I was a manager for most of the time (approximately 10 years at different hierarchical levels), there was a policy of no layoffs except in criminal cases, which gave employees a certain level of arrogance. Unfortunately, I had to deal, more than once, with employees who actively tried to mess with me or a manager beneath me for whatever reasons, did I do something against them? No, it just happened to be that I was the unlucky manager of the time.
I no longer work at that place and in my new position, where I’m not a manager by personal choice, I see a world more similar to the one you describe, simply because accountability exists, so the bad apples are fired when they start to cause problems.
This you describe is common here in LATAM