Daniel om "7 Reasons Your Employees Hate You" from Valtech Sweden on Vimeo.

Special thanks to Veronica Karnig for this translation of the video!

I have been to a "core conversation" as it's called. It's when one person leads a panel discussion with people in the audience. The overall theme was about how to have fun at work and this particular conversation was about "seven reasons why your employees hate you". 

The conversation was primarily geared toward new managers, but also toward more experienced managers and touched on the fact that people leave companies not only because the company is bad, but often primarily because the manager is bad. Good corporate culture is usually not enough and it's really important to constantly improve on your management skills. 

So he had a suggestion for how to do this and that is to go through a strategic paper that has four parts. The first part is to establish what you want to achieve with your management style, for example, if you want to create a more open climate or maybe want to have a more effective team. 

Then, after that, you're supposed to figure out why you hate certain people, generally speaking. Why you for instance hate certain managers. That could, for instance, be because managers don't understands how to execute a on a certain job or because they don't care if a project goes down hill and ignore moving obstacles out of the way or because they micromanage and make too many decisions and constantly tell you what to do. It can be managers that have too many ideas, new ideas every day even, or managers who look away and don't take any responsibility. It can be managers who don't help you to focus and allocate your time properly. 

Then when you have brain stormed about reasons why you hate certain managers, you were supposed to identify a few you think can be applicable to yourself and create a "mind map." I'm going to show here a little of what it looks like. You place yourself here in the middle and then you add reasons why you think employees hate you. 

Here for example is one reason, that you ignore your employees too much, and then you add questions why that may be the case. Here, for example, a reason could be that you trust that they will do a good job. Then you ask the question why you do that and that could be because you think and trust that they are smart. Then you come to the conclusion that thinking that they are smart does not mean that they are well informed and if they are not informed they will not do a good job. Then after a while you find three or four reasons why you could be hated. 

Then the last thing you do in this exercise is to try to identify and write down tactical points for what to do to address these problems. This could be done fairly quickly, he thought it can be done within 15 minutes.