Yhyjyk

Pull him aside and apologize if you believe you were out of line. I have tended to respect managers in the past that were willing to see that they overreacted or jumped to conclusions. It doesn't have to be a long drawn-out discussion, but a simple, "Hey...didn't realize the circumstances of...."

When I first joined the workforce I did something to earn a berating session by my manager at the time. That was on Friday. On Monday he called me back in his office, where he apologised for being too harsh, because it was a relatively junior mistake - representative of my experience - and he felt (correctly) he had overreacted.

That weekend I was left with the incident in my mind, which kinda festered, and I had enough time to change my perspective of him. I appreciated the apology but I was young and impressionable, and the damage was done. From then on our relationship remained less great than it could have been otherwise.

My point is, you were able to "move on" but your employee obviously has not. It's always easy to do the moving on if you're the one venting your spleen. He has no recourse to this, no way to "even up". His pride is hurt and probably feels bad cause his overtime efforts were obviously not appreciated by you.

And as a rule of thumb, it's always a good idea to apologise as soon as you realize you should.

The not so minor problem here is "berating" your employee. It does not matter what your reasoning is, to "scold or criticize angrily", the definition of "berate", is not professional. Of course they are disgruntled.. I would be too. A strong apology for your overreaction and a sincere and visible effort to change how you work with people is really the only thing I can suggest

It isn't unreasonable.

The problem is that you were disrespectful to an employee. They rightfully were upset by that. Even now you are continuing to disrespect them by stating that they are overreacting and implying that they should just move on, since you have. But this wasn't yours to move on from. You weren't the aggrieved.

You made the mistake, own up to it. Stop trying to minimize what you did and start treating the employee with respect. They just completed overtime for you and in return you berated them. I'd be angry too. I can't imagine you smoothed things over very sincerely considering the dismissive language in your question. Go back. Do it right. In the future don't invalidate the way people feel, it will make you a less effective leader. Everyone feels the way they do for a reason and if you understand that you can better understand them.

The mistake here was not so much that you forgot about the scheduling adjustments, nor that you were unaware of the employee's presence in the building before you saw him (though those, too, were mistakes). It's that you berated the employee, which would not be minor in any case, and the justification you claimed was also wrong.

So you laid into this employee for no reason, and seem to be minimizing/excusing/justifying your behavior even after it's become clear that you were totally wrong even according to the line of reasoning you describe here. Your employee is 100% justified in being upset over this. Even if you feel it's minor, your employee now cannot trust arrangements they've explicitly made with you, cannot trust you to be aware of facts (definitely available to you) before committing to inappropriate office behavior, and can be fairly certain that you'll try to dodge accountability for your behavior. Those aren't minor for someone that works for you and is vulnerable to your caprice.

You should talk to the employee again, provided that you can do the following during that exchange:

• Take responsibility for your mistakes and inappropriate behavior




• Refrain from minimizing the incident or justifying why you "deserve"
  a free pass for what happened




• Offer a sincere apology



• Provide some sort of assurance that the employee won't be subject to
  this sort of bad behavior from you in the future

Yes, you should speak to him again.

Apologize for your mistake.

Understand your mistake.

You already accept that you made a mistake, but it's not clear that you understand exactly what the mistake was. It wasn't just misunderstanding or forgetting about his previously agreed start time, or even that you berated him - it's that you did not give him the opportunity to explain until after you started berating him. You acted without full information. In a position of authority, you must not do that.

Avoid similar mistakes in future.

As a manager, there will be a time and a place when you may have to discipline your staff or correct them over behavioural matters (I'm not sure I'd call it "berating", but that's beside the point). You must never do that without full information. Always ask for an explanation before launching into that kind of conversation.

You overreacted to a perceived "mistake" that wasn't actually the employee's mistake at all, but was your own, and when it was made known to you that it was your mistake and not his, you brushed it off like "a simple mistake". The employee is therefore rightfully upset; would it have been "a simple mistake" if it was actually the employee's fault, and if the employee brushed it off lightly, as you did to him, what would you have done?

There's not a heck of a lot you can do at this point, you've already made an ass of yourself to your subordinate. Expect that subordinate to henceforth be extremely resistant to working overtime when you ask him to, as he should be (he should be resistant to overtime anyway, but he will be extra resistant now). I would avoid asking him for any overtime for at least a month, possibly more.

The employee may be afraid that this incident may show up on a formal review; I have had cases in the past where I had an issue, that issue turned out to be my manager's fault, I "resolved" it with my manager, and then my manager raised the issue again during a performance review and pegged it as my fault again. You should present a written apology to your employee, that he can present back to you if this issue ever comes up again, and that he can bring to HR in the event he is terminated on a matter related to this, as proof that this issue was not his fault. It is possible the employee will use this written apology to raise this issue to HR as you being an incompetent manager. He'd be right to do so, and that's your problem, not his.

The issue here is not the particular incident.

Common sense and real-life experience suggests that anyone who is a competent manager or administrator behaves in a generally consistent manner.

You have just demonstrated to your employee what your "consistent manner" of dealing with this sort of incident is. As such, it is perfectly reasonable for the employee to assume that if something similar occurs again, you will behave in the same way.

The employee is probably quite well aware that you are "overworked and overstretched" - and real-life experience suggests that overworked and overstretched people are the least likely to suddenly change their behaviour, at least until the root cause of the overwork goes away.

If that means your employee is now looking for another job, it's too late to change the situation now. Consider that he/she has probably told all his/her co-workers what happened, as well.

(Of course if the employee has the opinion that in fact you don't operate in a consistent manner, that does nothing to improve the situation from his/her point of view.)

To quote an old saying, you made your own bed - now lie in it.

Berating someone when they did nothing wrong creates in their head a work environment going forward where they can expect to be subjected to that treatment in a completely capricious manner.

Apology is a good first step, but honestly this should never have happened in the first place. Even if you abjectly apologize for your mistake, the damage is still done. You could still make a similar mistake in the future, and seem to be reserving for yourself the right to behave that way at (from the employee's perspective) any random moment.

Better would be to never ever "berate" an employee unless you are 100% sure what's going on. Best would be to never ever "berate" an employee period. Every company I've ever worked for has policies and procedures for dealing with tardiness issues. If you aren't able to deal with subordinate issues in a professional manner, perhaps that shouldn't be part of your job portfolio.

The employee has every right to be upset with you. You need to apologize IMMEDIATELY. What concerns me is that you are posting here to justify your poor management. As a manager, you're in charge of managing people and work. You're a leader who sets examples. Leaders who lose their cool and resort to emotional embarrassment are not leaders, they are seen as someone who can't control their emotions.

Your employees are not robots, they are real people with families, hopes and dreams. A lot of people feel justified to berating their employees because they were once treated that way. Whether or not that's the case for you, it's a wrong outlook. At this point, you need to consider if you can handle the management position.

The coworker is reasonably upset. People don't like to be berated. People especially don't like to be berated for doing what they are told. Now you need to 100% own your mistake. Your mistake isn't just getting the facts wrong, it also includes how you handled yourself.