Two hours. That's all it takes for the team to fall apart in my absence. This may sound a little arrogant on my part, assuming that the team could not function in a responsible and rational way without my presence to oversee things, but sometimes this is one of the joys of teamleadership.
Kate intercepted me on my return and requested an audience in one of the empty meeting rooms.
"Gareth's out of control," She told me. "He won't listen to me. He won't do what I ask of him,"
Kate had demonstrated the first mistake that newly promoted staff make. She'd presumed that the team would blindly follow her requests like a group of squaddies that had just stepped from their passing out parade.
"Tell me exactly what happened," I asked Kate calmly.
"I gave him some of the file allocations to complete but he said that he had an urgent complaint case to clear. I told him that the file allocations were more urgent and should be his priority for the morning. But he still refused,"
"What did he say?"
"He said that you'd expected him to close off the complaint case today. When I asked him to drop the complaint he said I was overly sensitive,"
"He said you were 'overly sensitive'?" I questioned.
"I'm not though!" shrilled Kate in a way that I should not at all describe as 'sensitive'.
"I'll have a word with him," I told Kate.
When I got to my desk there already was an email from Gareth, blinking politely in my inbox.
"Luke. Can I have a minute." He'd written. "It's about Kate..."
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