Complicated

I am managing a team of people collecting data. One was spectacularly late today, and another was rude. I hate being an authority figure, I hate trying to correct people's behaviour. But the data needs to be collected. And I don't need drama.

But the two individuals in question probably have constraints I don't know about - maybe the first one was late because people in her life are unreliable. Maybe the second one was rude because no boss in her life has been worth obeying.

It's hard for me not to overthink things. The cool logical part of me says to let them know that if they don't want the job and aren't prepared to do it right, they needn't bother coming back. The part of me that recognizes how complicated the world is, and how unlikely it is that I have anything like the whole picture, wants to solve all of their problems so we can just get on with doing the damn job. I can never ever stop looking at situations from everyone else's perspective, and it makes me an uncommon unpersuasive advocate of my own position.