I have been a manager for systems support at a plant for two years, and made a lateral move to a different plant nearby last week. Everything is going well so far, but I have a new direct report with some very obvious flaws.
He is smart and dedicated to his job, but he simply talks too much. All of the time. If he was just chatty and putting off work, I’d know how to manage it, but we had a very specific incident at work this morning where it really went too far. We had a system outage, and an operations manager came to our office and asked what was wron. He immediately went on a long-winded, fast-paced rant full of technical jargon about what the problem was and why our department couldn’t do anything about it. I was down the hall when this went down but stopped what I was doing after I realized he wasn’t going to slow down to tell him I needed him to look at something else just so he would… Stop.
I don’t know how to have a conversation about how inappropriate this was, especially since I am so new and this could very well be the result of anxiety in a high-pressure situation, and I want to be sensitive to that. Any advice is truly appreciated.