Has your management ever ghosted you? Have you found yourself trying to get in contact with them and only hearing crickets? You are not alone. It can be frustrating to work with management that treats your collaboration like a relationship gone wrong… cutting off contact after you are hired, not accepting your calls, not responding to your emails or requests for meetings. If this is happening to you, you are truly experiencing management that has brought ghosting into the workplace.
It’s almost impossible to feel confident that you can successfully accomplish your daily work assignments without the knowledge that you have the support of your management. When management is absent, disengaged, and unresponsive, you don’t know if you are meeting expectations and their lack of engagement can get in the way of promotion and transition conversations. Here’ are 5 tips on how to counteract their behavior from becoming a hurdle to your career goals:
1. Seek Supervision Elsewhere: If your management is not available to discuss your desires to transition to another department, aspirations to land a promotion, or how to ace your performance evaluation, its time to get help outside of them. Strategize with your success squad, your career executive board. What steps did your role model take to be successful? What has your mentor done in similar situations? Ask your career coach whether it’s time to plan an effective exit strategy. Your sponsor can suggest other departments or companies where you will have attentive management and help you connect with them.
2. Be Clear on What You Need: If your management meets with you sporadically, you must leverage that time into supervision intensives. Prepare your concerns and possible solutions, then send an agenda with your desired outcomes for your time together. Schedule your next two meetings during the current conversation.
3. Location, Location, Location: If you have management that is inconsistent with the platform and vehicle, they use to support you on, be innovative and flexible with how you meet with them. Text messages, video chat, group messaging, prerecorded and live recordings allow you to communicate quickly and have multiple forms of communication on expectations and deadlines.
4. Chat With HR: If you have an employer that is only responsive to benchmarks and not to your professional growth, book a conversation with HR. You’ll have to play this one smart. If not done carefully it will look like you are throwing your management under the bus. If done carefully, you will give the impression that you are a committed employee who can transform the business. When you meet with HR ask what skills development is available. If they don’t have anything available, be ready to present a snapshot of the needs of employees and at least three businesses that are available to work with your current employer to give you the on the job career coaching you need. Tie the need to outcomes. Be sure to also ask if there are any opportunities to get cross training from other departments or for the chance to spearhead projects that keep management aware of how they can prepare their staff to more quickly achieve company goals.
5. Keep a Record: If your management tends to be absent and take credit for your work, pull out the receipts Sis! Always put read receipt on emails, keep a record of date and times you initiated communication with them and their lack of response, and keep a running record what you accomplished despite their absenteeism. Work Journal. A Place to Record How Awesome You Are © and the accompanying Career Kit simplifies your record keeping process and coaches you on the important information to record.
Click here to get your copy of Work Journal. A Place to Record How Awesome You Are ©.