Job descriptions (part 1)

Image source: referenceborbusiness.com

While I was at a conference today, I had an interesting conversation with a lady about her company. She owns a music school and has recently started having to hire employees. She doesn’t have much experience with people management, so she asked me a few questions. One of them had to do with how close she should be to her employees.

She is a people person so, naturally, she enjoys relationship building. And she has an employee that has used that as an excuse to not respect her as the boss. It’s not that the employee is evil… it’s just that this other person didn’t follow through on an assigned task and it left the owner looking unprepared, and very frustrated.

When she asked me what she could do, I encouraged her to spell out her expectations for each employee and position – basically, I encouraged her to come up with job descriptions for each employee.