Thank the Goddess that I don't have a job. Funny thing to say in this economy, but I don't miss the bosses. Oh there are a few that I'd like to meet in a dark alley with a baseball bat in my hands but most were just incompetent hacks on a power trip. I recall working for 2 different companies where management actually solicited suggestions from the computer programming staff for ideas to increase productivity. That always made me laugh out loud. Productivity, I was taught in college as an Economics Major, is a management problem and they were showing their incompetence as managers by asking the question. Another issue in the Information Technology (I.T.) world was maintenance time. We were in a departmental meeting and the manager was haranguing us about how much time we were wasting doing maintenance and insisted we reduce that time. I asked him, in front of the staff, how much time we should devote per system. I asked if 5% of my time per system was unreasonable. He said that 5% seemed about right. I said "well, I have responsibility for 20 systems. 20 times 5% is 100%. I won't be doing any new development anytime soon." POW! This particular manager was easy to sucker punch and I did it as often as possible. His way of getting back was to assign me the task of documenting every minute of everyday for the previous year. This was a 3 week vacation for me. At the end of 3 weeks of reading books in the cafeteria I would dummy up some phony data and turn it in. Nothing became of it. We both wasted an incredible amount of resources doing our little management/employee dance.
Now here's the problem in I.T. - most if not all managers were programmers who came up through the ranks and, as the Peter Principal states, rose to their level of incompetency. I.T. managers are seldom trained as managers. Oh they take a class or two but their mindset is still one of a puzzle worker and not a people guider. My father rose to his level of incompetency with IBM in the 60's and became a midlevel manager. (Yes, I was actually a second generation computer program as is my sister.) One time his team had screwed up royally and his higher ups came down on him like the proverbial ton of bricks. A sympathetic Vice President took him under wing and told my father to announce there would be a reorganization his department. My dad asked what good would that do and the V.P. said "they will have to leave you alone for at least a month in order to see if the reorg works. By that time they will have moved on to micro-managing another department and will have forgotten all about you." This is corporate
So I suppose what I am saying is that we are put into adversarial roles. Labor vs. Management,
How do we change this mess? I think we need a code of conduct for the work place. And not the reactionary rules like sexual harassment and non drug use rules we have today. What I propose is guiding principals that incorporate ideals such as every person should feel important, positive effort gets positive praise, politeness is a job requirement. Over the Holidays one year I took a seasonal job with Barnes and Noble books and they had an interesting policy. "It is corporate policy the when one employee helps another employee the helped employee must thank the helping employee." It was a simple thing really. But I watched it in action and saw that it sparked a synergistic energy between employees. Put in simpler terms, you feel like working when people are nice around you and you don't feel like working when they are not.
How hard is that to understand and why don't managers know this?
