This first ran on HMA Time, the blog for the agency where my dear friend, Abbie Fink, is a partner. If you saw it there first, you can skip to the comments today. That’s the good stuff anyway!

I remember being a young whippersnapper in the big agency world (come on; it wasn’t THAT long ago!). I could not wait until someone gave me a chance to manage others. I just knew that would be my big break!

The chance came a lot sooner that I expected…or probably deserved. I was all of maybe 25 and a young woman a couple of years older than me was on probation. My supervisor really wanted to give her one more shot at turning things around and she figured it was a good way for me to cut my teeth on management.

I failed. Miserably.

The young woman on probation wasn’t going to make it, but no one told me that. I met with her once a day to review the goals she’d be given and to provide feedback on where to improve. The first couple of meetings were hard – she did NOT want to be there (and, really, who can blame her?). And then she just stopped showing up. She was gone about two weeks after they’d “given” her to me to manage. (more…)