Sabrina Baker  0:10  
The HR Happy Hour Network is proudly sponsored by Workhuman. Nearly nine in 10 HR leaders say they don't have a strong leadership bench. Workhuman's future leaders gives organizations a smarter way to build one. Future leaders is the first talent intelligence solution to identify high potential VP plus talent already within your workforce up to four years before promotion, using proprietary AI and real-time recognition data. It uncovers the leadership signals hidden in everyday work long before traditional succession planning can. It's a smarter, data-driven approach to building tomorrow's leaders. Learn more at workhuman.com. Thanks for joining us. 

Sabrina Baker  0:58  
Welcome back to the HR Connection on the HR Happy Hour Network, I'm your host Sabrina Baker, CEO and founder of Acacia HR Solutions. If you happen to tune in last month, we talked about a problem almost every HR leader in a one to 500 employee business faces, and that is how do you build leadership development when you have a total budget of $0? We broke down how to build scrappy internal peer learning pods, low cost mentorship structures, things that actually stick. Today, we are diving into the exact operational emergency that makes zero budget leadership development an urgent necessity, and that is the accidental manager trap. Here is a pretty common scenario. I guarantee you, this happens in your business. You have the star performer. Let's call him Dave. Dave is a phenomenal senior software engineer, or maybe he is an incredible sales rep. He hits every metric. He works hard, and he knows the product inside out. So leadership does what growing companies always do. They reward Dave by promoting him to manager overnight. Dave goes from managing code or managing accounts to managing people, except no one trained Dave. No one walked him through employment law, wage and hour compliance, or how to have a tough performance conversation. Fast forward six months, Dave is stressed out. His direct reports are frustrated. Turnover in his department is creeping up, and guess whose desk that fallout lands on? Yours, of course. In a company with 50, 100, or 250 employees, you don't have a corporate learning and development department to help Dave. You are the HR department, and when an accidental manager makes a mistake, it isn't just an internal friction point. It's a massive legal and financial liability for the business. Today, we're going to unpack the three biggest compliance and operational risks created by untrained managers, and I'm going to give you a plug-and-play framework to give them development on these things from day one before the problem starts, let's jump right in. 

Sabrina Baker  3:23  
When leadership promotes an individual contributor without training, they usually focus on the upside of promotion. They keep they're keeping talent happy. They're filling an org chart box. But as HR leaders, we see the downstream operational risks. There are three major landmines accidental managers lay down every single day. Risk number one is wage and hour and timekeeping violations. The absolute fastest way a small business gets hit with a class action lawsuit or a Department of Labor audit is through manager level wage and hour ignorance. I've been doing this for 15 years. Accidental managers often come from individual contributor roles where they worked off the clock or they responded to emails at 10 p.m. without thinking twice. So when they become managers, they then expect their employees to do the same, even their non-exempt ones. They send Slack messages at night. They tell an employee, hey, real quickly wrap up that presentation before you clock in tomorrow, or they alter timesheets because they don't want their department to go over on overtime budgets. They aren't doing this out of malice typically. They literally do not understand FLSA classification or strict timekeeping compliance, but the Department of Labor doesn't care if Dave was just trying to be helpful. Off the clock work accumulates penalties very fast. 

Sabrina Baker  4:52  
Risk two is the friend to boss documentation gap. Accidental managers are often promoted from. Within their existing peer team, on Friday Dave is drinking with his team, his peers, and on Monday he's their manager. That's a huge swing because Dave wants to maintain those friendships, those relationships, he avoids conflict. When an employee starts showing up late, missing deadlines, or slacking off, Dave doesn't document it, he doesn't have to do anything formal. He has very informal chats over lunch, like, "Hey, man, can you try to pick it up a bit? Then six months later, Dave walks into your HR office, red faced, and says, "I've had it with Sarah. She's terrible. I want to fire her today. And you ask the golden HR question. Come on, say it with me. What documentation do we have? And Dave looks at you blankly because he has none, zero, no write-ups, no email, no paper trail. And Sarah's last performance review, which is always the kicker, and Dave signed off on, says she absolutely exceeded expectations. Now, if you fire Sarah, you are sitting on a massive wrongful termination or discrimination risk because your accidental manager didn't know to establish a paper trail.

Sabrina Baker  6:12  
Risk number three is misunderstanding reasonable accommodations and protected leaves, and this one's really big, and I see this one the most. This is really scary I think for small businesses. A direct report confides in their new manager during a one-on-one. Hey, I've really been struggling with severe anxiety lately, and my medication makes it hard to focus in the mornings. Now, an untrained manager often responds with one of two dangerous extremes. They either ignore it completely and start writing the person up for performance, or they say something off the cuff like, "Well, if you can't handle the morning shift, maybe this role isn't a good fit for you. Both of those are scary responses. That signal, single sentence, the last one, just triggered ADA interactive process liabilities and potential retaliation claims. The manager doesn't even realize that a casual comment about a medical condition puts the entire company on official notice under federal and state employment laws. 

Sabrina Baker  7:13  
Now, even zero budget, sneaky leadership development needs executive level buy-in. So, it needs your CEO founder if they have an executive team. It needs their buy-in. So you're going to want to talk to them about the things that I'm going to lay out today, and then any ongoing leadership development. You want to know that they're going to back you up, that this is an important thing, and that they are going to reinforce anything that you are sharing. And I know what happens when you go to your CEO, your CFO, your COO, whoever it is, and you say, "Hey, we really need to train our new managers. They will often say, "Oh, we don't have the time for that, or we don't have the budget, or they'll just kick it to next quarter, right? And so, to get them to actually buy into this, to to get them to buy into any kind of development, even free, you have to speak their language, like we've talked about before. Financial risk are so. Let me break down for you what an untrained accidental manager actually cost a 100 person business in hard dollars. I'm going to give you a couple of scenarios. So let's talk about a wrongful termination. When a manager fires an employee without documentation, and that employee files a charge of discrimination or wrongful termination, defending the EEOC charge alone costs 15 to $50,000 in legal fees, and that's before any settlement or court verdict. Let's talk about some FLSA back pay and the penalty multipliers you can have if an accidental manager allows three hourly employees to work just 30 minutes of unrecorded off the clock time for day for a year that equals over 375 hours of on play time. Under FLSA, courts can award double liquidated damages plus attorneys' fees. A minor oversight is quickly going to turn into like a $30,000 plus penalty. Let's talk about turnover and replacement costs. People don't leave companies; they leave managers. You've heard this. Replacing a mid-level employee costs roughly 1.5 to two times their annual salary in recruiting fees, lost productivity, and onboarding costs. If an accidental manager drives away two good employees a year because of poor communication or micromanagement, that's $150,000 plus walking right out the door. When you present these numbers to your executive team, manager training stops looking like a nice to have HR initiative and starts looking like essential business risk management to anybody who's paying attention. So let me make this really tangible. How do these compliance and operational issues actually sound in real life? I want to walk through three scenario breakdowns comparing what an untrained manager does or says versus what a trained manager does or says, so that it's kind of obvious for you.

Sabrina Baker  9:59  
Scenario A is the late night Slack message. So here's the situation: an hourly client support rep receives a Slack message from their manager at 8:30 on a Tuesday, asking for an update on a customer issue. The untrained manager says, "Hey, can you quickly jump into the portal and check if the ticket for client X was resolved? I need to know before tomorrow's call. Now, here's why that's wrong. We know this. The manager just requested uncompensated, non-exempt work after hours. What would a trained manager do? They would say, "Hey, no need to log on tonight. First thing tomorrow morning, when you clock in, after you clock in, please check the status of client X tickets so we have it for our morning call. This sets really clear expectations while protecting the company from wage and hour violations. 

Sabrina Baker  10:52  
Let's look at another scenario: an unexpected medical disclosure. So the situation is that during a weekly one-on-one, an employee says, "My doctor is starting me on a new treatment next week, and I might need to take every Friday off for the next month. The untrained manager says, "Wow, Fridays are our busiest days. I don't know if the team can cover you for a whole month. Can you see if the doctor can do Saturdays instead? And we know why this is wrong, right? This sounds like we're denying an accommodation request on the spot and opens the door to disability discrimination claims. A trained manager is going to say, "Hey, thanks for giving me a heads up. Your health comes first. Let's connect with HR today so they can get you the right paperwork for medical leave or for scheduling accommodations, and we will figure this out together. So much better, right? It expresses empathy. It avoids making legally binding commitments, and it routes the request directly to HR's formal interactive process. 

Sabrina Baker  11:52  
And then finally, scenario C addressing recurring performance, poor performance. So the situation would be an employee submits a project three days late for the third time this month, an untrained manager may say, "Hey, why is this late again? You really need to pull your weight around here. People are getting super frustrated. Why does that not work? Because it uses emotional, vague language that feels like a personal attack and creates zero usable documentation. A trained manager using our coin method, which we're going to talk about, might say on Monday the Q3 report was due at 9 a.m. It was submitted on Thursday at 2 p.m. This delayed our client presentation and forced the design team to work late. Next time, please talk to me about any roadblocks that you are having that is causing delay, so we can make our deadline commitments. This works so much better because it stays objective. It focuses on the observable facts and it identifies root causes. And it also creates a clear email paper trail, assuming that they know to make sure it's sent via email. 

Sabrina Baker  12:57  
So through those examples, you can see how an accidental manager, an untrained manager just unwittingly, unknowingly can set you up for a wage and hour claim, a lawsuit, an EEOC claim, where a trained manager, somebody who's just gone through the steps that we're going to talk about next, protects themselves, the employee, and the company. It's very small differences, and very easy training can make that difference. So, how do we fix this when you don't have a $50,000 leadership training budget, or even a $50 one, or you don't have three days to send managers away to a conference? I don't even know if there is a conference that would train managers around this stuff, but man, it would be really nice if there were, huh? Anyway, this connects directly back to what we discussed last month in the last episode about zero budget leadership development. You don't need a formal academy; that's the good news. You need to embed bite-sized micro training into existing operational touchpoints. So let me give you three steps that you can implement this week or even today if you are that eager.

Sabrina Baker  14:06  
 The first step is to create the first 30-day manager guardrails. The moment, the absolute moment, someone is promoted, you want to give them a simple one-page document titled "Manager Compliance Guardrails. It's not 100-page handbook that nobody is going to read. It is a one pager that covers strictly five, maybe more, non-negotiable rules. Now, here are my most common suggestions, but you change them or add to them based on your industry and your business. You know what your managers do the most that creates massive liability include all of those things, but let me give you mine just for examples. Rule number one: You cannot fire, formally discipline, or cut hours without HR review. Essentially, you cannot make major changes to your employee's work arrangement without HR review. Rule. Number two, if an employee mentions health, family emergencies, or accommodation requests, your only response is "Thank you for letting me know. Let's connect with HR to see how we can support you. Rule number three: All non-exempt hours must be logged accurately. No off-the-clock work ever. No deleting overtime and promising time off later. Later number four, performance feedback must be written down in an email follow up if you gave it verbally first. All performance feedback must be documented, or it will assumed to have not been given. Finally, rule number five: confidentiality is absolute. Salary performance. medical discussions-they never leave your one-on-ones or your conversations. You are no longer everyone's friend or peer; you are their leader. And confidentiality about anything related to one employee stays with appropriate parties, and those parties are usually the employee, their manager, HR, maybe, and maybe a senior leader, maybe. So they get this one-page document with your rules. You tell them to keep it somewhere they will see it. Writing it down and making it brief means it is more likely to be read and revisited. You could tell them all of these things in like a manager or orientation verbally, but they're going to forget them within an hour. This is really why I like one document that all new leaders get on day one. So that's step one. 

Sabrina Baker  16:30  
Step two is going to be to run 15-minute tactical micro sessions instead of scheduling some two-hour training block that managers will absolutely try to cancel because they are way too busy. Schedule just a 15-minute micro session where you cover topics that new managers need. You can do this in groups if you have more than one new manager. I would actually encourage that, but they also absolutely works individually. Make these topics things you know they will face and train them at a manager 101 level, no matter how good of a natural leader they think they are. You can just take the rules document that you just created and expand on each one in a 15 minute training. So you're going to pick one real world scenario per month. So here's here's a list of an example. Month one: How to write a clear factual performance note after a one-on-one. Month two: What to do when an employee asks for time off for a medical reason. Month three could be how to give constructive feedback without sounding aggressive or apologetic. You want to keep it conversational. Walk through a five-minute case study, maybe give them a one-page template they could use with that specific training and answer their questions. It's 100% free, and it takes zero budget, and steadily builds managerial maturity over time. Doing the same topics with all new managers means they all hear the same thing, which should also build continuity in how things are handled internally, which really is amazing. 

Sabrina Baker  18:07  
Step three is going to be to implement a standard feedback model. You want to teach your new managers one simple communication framework. I always train the Coin method. There's SBI. There's others. You pick yours, but let's talk about Coin because this is the one that I think can give you a good example. C is for context. Set the stage immediately with zero ambiguity. You need to give a specific time and place. So, for example, yesterday during our nine a.m. client kickoff sync. That's C. It is very clear. O is for observation. State the exact observable behavior. Just the facts, no feelings. So, for example, you walked into the meeting 15 minutes late without heads up. That is very factual. I then is for impact. Connect the behavior to team operations or business standards. So, for this example, the impact was that we had to stall in front of the client, and it signaled to them that our team isn't aligned. And then finally, N is for next steps. You want to define the future standard. An example using our our late employee going forward. I need you dialed in and ready five minutes before client sync start. Can we agree to that? What I really love about the coin method is that when managers use it, it strips away all emotion. It prevents feeling like they're being personally attacked, and it automatically creates the objective documentation HR needs if performance issues escalate. Now, this is just one of two methods that I teach in new manager feedback training. The other is start, stop, and continue, which is kind of my personal favorite, but it's for less formal feedback. I just did a full YouTube video on both, which I will link below if you want to check it out. It's 10 minutes of how to train on giving feedback, how to train two different models that, if implemented correctly, could change your HR life. 

Sabrina Baker  19:56  
To wrap things up for today, accidental managers are usually your hardest workers and highest potential stars. They want to do a good job, but putting them in a management seat without any guardrails is setting them up for burnout and setting your company up for compliance risk by implementing quick 15-minute micro trainings and setting clear compliance guardrails on day one, you sneak in high impact leadership development without spending a dime. Today, to make this effortless for you, I've put together a free tool. This is the first time manager risk checklist. So it's this document. It has 16 rules covering mandatory compliance, wage and hour basics, and documentation that every new manager in a one to 500 employee company needs to know on day one. It's going to get you started on creating your own rule list. You can use the ones there, or you can change it. You hand this directly to your new managers, or use it to audit your current team's risk. The link to download is also in the description box. Thanks so much for tuning in to the HR Connection on the HR Happy Hour Network. Make sure to hit subscribe, share this episode with a fellow HR leader, and I will see you next month.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai