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She snorted. “Hardly. The first year I was here, he had me sit in on his meetings and just follow him around everywhere. It was a total waste of time, and that’s how I figured out how little he actually does that pertains to this job. In fact, it was my idea to take on employee satisfaction as my focus. I never had an agenda or goals. It’s like he expected me to glean his priorities and just materialize the job for myself out of thin air. I found where I thought I could have the most impact.”
The holes in this chain of command were becoming abundantly clear. “So, would you say you feel as though your father has given you very little direction in terms of what he expects?”
“Absolutely,” she nodded, relief clear in her expression. “So I figured out a path for myself, and now I feel as if I’m being punished for not doing it his way. If he’d told me he had certain expectations, I would have met them. I thought the point was to allow me to find my way, and now that I finally have, he’s brought in the calvary to fix me,” she gestured in my direction. “Which, no offense, is pretty messed up.”
I drew in a deep breath to force down my annoyance. I understood her frustration, but that didn’t mean she was 100% right, either.
“I think it’s reasonable to state that his expectations may have been unreasonable. You can’t tell someone they failed to accomplish something when you never told them what you wanted.”
“Exactly, thank you.”
“So I will ask him to provide us with a list of expectations to work on. That’ll help us figure out where the gaps lay between what you’re doing and what he wants.”
Anger flashed across her stunning features. “Now wait a second—what do you mean, a list of expectations?”
“Well, if your commanding officer believes you aren’t meeting expectations, he has to first set forth a list of expectations and provide them to you. It’s setting you up for failure to just expect you to glean what he wants without clear directives. No wonder you two are at odds.”
“We’re not at odds.” Her body stiffened and her voice became sharp. “Just because we have different management styles, that doesn’t mean I’m failing.”
I straightened in my seat. “No, absolutely not. I didn’t mean to imply there was some sort of failure on your part. Just a miscommunication that we can certainly clear up.”
“I’m not following.” Her tone was flat, and the slight downturn to her lips did nothing to make them less appealing.
“Look at it this way: Imagine you’re back in school, and the professor gave you a test. Except the questions are all blank, and you’re still supposed to choose the right answer. It’s not fair for him to have some sort of expectations that he doesn’t tell you. There’s no way you could live up to them.”
“Well, yes, but that’s not the point. The point is, I don’twantto live up to his criteria. I want him to trust me to lead the way I want to.Myway.”
I tried to think of an example to use, but unfortunately the military didn’t really set a precedent for ‘willful daughter wants to do her own thing with the family business.’
“I hear what you’re saying. But before we can try to spin him over to your way of thinking, we have to first understand what he wants, right? At least then we can meet in the middle and see where the differences lay.”
Her eyes narrowed as she thought it over, but eventually she sighed. “Okay, you have a point.”
“Thank you. That has been known to happen once or twice.”
A half smile curled her lips. “Don’t get cocky. You could just as easily lose it.”
“Okay, I’ll be careful.” I waited for a moment, but she had nothing else to add. “So… is this entire morning devoted to email?”
“No, actually Tuesday morning is my office hours.”
“Office hours?”
“Yeah, I make sure I don’t have any appointments and just am in my office, available, for anything that may come up.”
“What sort of thing comes up on Tuesday mornings?”
“This is when employees know I’m available to take their suggestions, or address an issue they have.”
This employee hand-holding thing went much deeper than even I realized, although I had my suspicions about why. “And how often do employees take advantage of your office hours?”
“I mean, I can’t say it’s every week, but I have been able to help someone out of a tight spot before,” Ellie replied with an edge to her tone. She was shockingly defensive to even the simplest question.
“Okay,” I replied, appeasing. Even though I understood why, her defensiveness was quickly becoming frustrating. “Just so I’m following, you devote this morning to checking your email and waiting for someone to need your help? And that’s at any level, right? Not just VPs and managers?”
“It’s not for the managers, actually. If they need something, they go to the VPs. This is only for my hourly employees.” She answered flippantly, eyes on her computer screen as if to show how little importance I held.
I swallowed down my surprise. “So, you have separate office hours for the managers?”
