The last day of November was the last day my admin had a job. This was my first time laying off an employee and it wasn’t fun or easy. And now, I’m a manager with no one to manage.

Actually, that doesn’t bother me as the work we were doing didn’t really need two people to do it, and I’m perfectly fine taking on the work she was doing for me. But now that I’m no longer anyone’s boss, I’m learning some great lessons about how to be a new boss. Ironic, isn’t it?

 

Last week, I had the cube walls that surrounded the reception area where she worked taken down. It opens up the front of our office considerably and I like it quite a bit. However, by making that change, I needed to go in and clean up the area and move some things around. While there, I discovered my admin was keeping hard copies of things we have no need to keep hard copies of- our budget reports, which are all available via our budgeting software; expense reports, which are all submitted online now; and employee timesheet corrections, when their manager is required to sign off on their time sheets (electronically) every two weeks.

Besides the fact that this information is all easily available via our computer systems, a lot of it can be considered confidential, too. And she was keeping two years’ worth of information in clearly marked binders, sitting out where anyone could get into it.

 

Upon discovering these notebooks, the first thing I did was empty them into the confidential shred bin. The second thing I did was talk to the admins who are taking over expense reports and explain that not only don’t they have to keep hard copies of the reports, they don’t even have to fax them in anymore- everything, receipts included, can be submitted electronically. I told them I would happily provide training for that part when they next submitted reports.

I’ll be handling the budget reports and timecard changes from now on, so I don’t have to retrain anyone on those.

 

But the big thing here was what I realized. I was not actually surprised when I found the notebooks. The woman who previously had my position was a legacy. She had been with the company, and with my department for over 30 years. This position was created around her. She believed in having a hard copy of everything. When she trained me on processes for this job, most of them involved printing out hard copies of monthly reports and storing them in binders. It should have occurred to me that this would have been the process she required from her admin, too.

 

The question I have to ask myself is why I did not realize this while my admin was still here. The notebooks were big and clearly labeled on her workstation. The answer is my own assumptions.

Before I took on this role, I was an admin analyst, doing very similar work to what my admin was doing, including monthly budget reports, expense reports, and timekeeping. I did not keep hard copies of any of these things. I was thrilled when we started being able to attach receipts electronically instead of faxing them in for expense reports. Because I knew how I had done things, for some reason I assumed that was the way my admin was doing them. This was a bad assumption not just because you should never assume that people do things the way you do them, but because I knew very well who her previous boss had been and what her brand of crazy was like.

The fact that my admin kept working like this was not my admin’s fault. It was very much my own failing.

 

So this is what I have learned. Next time I have a direct report, whether they are brand new to a role or have been in their job for years, I need to take time to sit down with them during every task they do. In some cases it may be to train them, but I also need to learn how they work. If there are steps they are doing that don’t need to be done, I can catch it early on and save all of us work.

My goal isn’t to make the person do things exactly how I would do them, but to make sure we are both on the same page about what needs to be done, what needs to be kept, and also to learn how they are comfortable working. I think it’s just as important for a manager to adapt as it is for their direct reports.

So next time, if there ever is a next time, I will be a better boss.