Happy Wednesday! Today’s 1 Smart Business Story looks at leadership anxiety that many managers experience but few actually say out loud. The fear that you might not be cut out to manage people. 

Most managers will tell you confidence doesn’t show up fully formed on day one. Like any role, management is a learned skill and such missteps as bad hires, expected turnover, or struggling employees can quickly lead to eroding confidence and make even the most capable leader question whether they belong in the role at all. 

Inc.’s workplace advice columnist Alison Green tackles a question that surfaces among both new and experienced managers: How do you tell the difference between growing pains and a sign you should step away from managing? 

In this story you will see how:

What advice might you give to someone struggling with confidence in a new role? Tell me more at [email protected]. 

I’ve made one bad hire after another.

BY ALISON GREEN, COLUMNIST

Inc.com columnist Alison Green answers questions about workplace and management issues—everything from how to deal with a micromanaging boss to how to talk to someone on your team about body odor.

I’m a newish manager, and I have one direct report. My new employee, “Susan,” quit this week. Her old employer had reached out to her and made her a dream offer. I spent five months training Susan. She had learned a lot and was starting to work well independently. The thought of starting over training a new employee is exhausting and depressing, and I feel completely defeated.

Susan isn’t the whole story. Before Susan, my employee was Joe. Joe worked for me for three months before his serious mental health issues became apparent. His anxiety and depression made it impossible for him to come to work on many days, and he told me that the job was too stressful. After a very unpleasant and dramatic three months, he resigned and I accepted his resignation. Then he tried to rescind his resignation and there was a period of time that I was genuinely afraid of him.

Before Joe, there was Emily. Emily was my first employee and mediocre in every way. She left after a year. In hindsight, she was fine and I could have done a better job training and managing her. At that point, I had never managed before, and I had no idea what I was doing! I didn’t know how good I had it with her!

I acknowledge that I made some mistakes as a manager, but some of the circumstances were out of my control, like Joe’s illness. Another complicating factor is that the job is focused on boring research, but due to company policies I’m not allowed to advertise it with a title that makes that completely clear. Instead, the role has a title that makes the work sound somewhat more interesting. For that reason, it’s difficult to recruit candidates who are okay with completing boring research 90 percent of the time.

So in less than two years, I’ve had three employees in the job. Any confidence I had as a manager is gone, and I worry about what others may think when they see the turnover in this role. Am I just a terrible manager? Can I chalk up my employees leaving to extenuating circumstances (mental illness, dream job offer)? Am I not cut out to be a manager? Or should I try again?

It sounds like you had bad luck with Joe and Susan. You can’t control for someone getting a dream offer, especially when the job you hired them for is somewhat boring. And you can’t control for someone’s mental illness.

That said, it also sounds like you could be doing a better job in hiring and managing. Both of those have a pretty big learning curve, so as a new manager that’s to be expected. But it’s also true that someone could be very good at hiring and still have run into those last two situations.

I’m not convinced the job title is the problem. You should lobby to change the title if it’s inaccurate or causing recruiting challenges. But even if you can’t change it, you can be up-front and transparent with candidates about the nature of the work, starting from the first contact you have with them after they apply. You can describe the work in detail and make it clear exactly what the job does and doesn’t entail. You also should be having candidates do hiring exercises — which will help you make better hires — and you can ensure that exercise gives them a very accurate taste of what the job will be like.

I’d also urge you not to decide you “had it good” with Emily just because she stayed for a year and was easier than Joe and Susan. If she was truly mediocre, you want to raise your bar, not lower it. That doesn’t mean you’re not right that you could have done a better job training and managing her — you were a brand new manager, so that’s almost certainly true. But it still doesn’t mean she was a great employee, and you shouldn’t settle for staff who you think of as “mediocre in every way.” That would be the wrong lesson to take from your experiences with Joe and Susan.

As for where to go from here … do you like managing? Does the idea of investing in yourself as a manager — learning to get better at hiring and better at managing — excite you or exhaust you? If you had more support — training, mentoring, guidance — would that change your outlook? Is there anyone around who can guide and mentor you, or are you totally on your own and expected to just figure it all out by yourself? Is your company willing to invest in management classes or other support? (In addition, here’s a column I wrote that asks some questions you can reflect on to assess how you’re doing as a manager.)

If you don’t feel a natural pull toward managing and you don’t have any help available … well, it’s a challenging job under the best of circumstances, and I wouldn’t feel a ton of optimism about that scenario. But if you have either of those two things, I’d keep giving it a shot.

Want to submit a question of your own? Send it to [email protected]. 

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