Nobody Told Dave

Nobody Told Dave: How Not to Cock Up Managing People is a practical, funny and refreshingly blunt guide to what really happens when human beings are put in charge of other human beings.Most workplace disasters don’t begin with a tribunal, a grievance or somebody being marched out of the building. They begin much earlier: with the conversation nobody had, the manager nobody trained, the policy nobody read, the problem everybody noticed but nobody dealt with, or the employee who was expected to know something that nobody actually told them.Drawing on years of real-world HR, management and investigation experience, Alan Pavey takes readers inside the everyday mistakes that turn small people problems into expensive ones. From contracts, handbooks, capability and misconduct to difficult conversations, grievances, WhatsApp evidence, investigations, bad managers and employment law, the book explains what good management looks like before, during and after things go wrong.At its heart is the DAVE Test: Direction, Ability, Visibility and Environment - a simple way of asking whether the employee really failed, whether the manager failed them, whether the organisation created the problem, or whether, sometimes, Dave really did just cock it up.This isn’t a dry HR textbook. It’s written for business owners, managers, employees, HR professionals and anyone who has ever sat in a meeting wondering, 'How the f*ck did we get here?'Expect strong language, sensible advice, recognisable workplace disasters and a recurring question that can save businesses an extraordinary amount of trouble:Did anybody actually tell Dave?