Being a Good Manager. Tip 3.

F7 | LIFESTYLE by Marie Mbula
Apr 17, 2015
2 min read

Adapt yourself to your employees.

Let me tell you the story of the experience I had when I first started to work in London.

I was very confident that it would be an easy job because I was coming from a hotel four times bigger than the one I was going. At 23 years old, I used to work in the centre of Paris in a 700 bedrooms hotel managing a team of 25 employees, in the best hotel in Paris. Also, I had been working for the company for 6 years so in my mind it will just be a piece of cake. The first challenge I faced was the language. I'm sure a majority of French people who came to London after learning English at school will be able to identify with me: the English learnt at school has almost nothing to do with the English you speak once in London.

As I was coming from France, I used to speak to my employees the exact way I used to speak French. Which was very wrong because the English way of speaking was much more polite than the French way of speaking. Guess what happened: my manager received a grievance. What a shock! I did not know that I would face that in my life. However it taught me something: to adapt myself to the employee I had in front of me. Although she was the only employee that wrote against me, I made the decision to look at the situation differently. I decided to have a conversation with her where we shared each others point of view. Our work relationship considerably improved and she became one of the top performing employee. (She even wrote me a card to apologise for her past behaviour). The change did not happen overnight, but because I decided to give my best and invest in her growth, she changed.

Never give up on somebody or on something until you know that you have given your very best, you will be surprised with the outcome.

Thanks for reading. If you would like to share some of your experiences with me or would like my point of view on a challenge at work, please feel free to email me: info@f7lifestyle.com.