I thought today I’d offer us all a few pointers that might help us not get tripped up and go into a negative emotional spiral. Just some simple tips that we can think about as we go about managing our crew.
1. Employee’s don’t owe us anything.   It’s so easy to think, “Look, I’m really a nice manager. I bend over backwards to make things work for my employees. At the very least I would hope they could show up on time and put in a decent effort and not have some of them always working the angles. I think they owe me that much for how hard I work on their behalf.”

Nope, sorry, they don’t owe us a thing.  That’s a messy foundation to build a working relationship on.  Watch out for this one.
2. Employees don’t have to be good employees.They really don’t have to be anything.  They are who they are and it’s not our job to fix or change them to meet our preference.  It’s our job to manage them to expectations in service to the co-op. They make their choices, and we use our management tools to be graceful, informative, and clear of what choices we will make in response. No need for us to moralize on whether the employee is being good or bad, just move forward with reasonable conversations and or consequences. 

3.  Employees aren’t there to make our life easier.They’re there to do their job.  The ease at which we do our job is dependent on our level of skill, the attention we’ve paid to develop our management tools and our mindset.  Our possible frustration, annoyance and hassle is up to us to manage within ourselves not present it to the employee to leverage them to change.
Well, I hope those help.  I know if I keep those in mind my job feels lighter and more “manageable”.