Category Archives: work

Managing up…

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I should give almost all of the writing credit for this post to a friend of mine who brought to my attention her belief that raising a toddler is effective practice for dealing with the average kind of management one encounters in the workplace. Now I’m just assuming these ideas are work to toddlers because I have no direct personal experience, but I can attest first hand that they can and probably should be applied to your interaction with management

The abridged list of ways to deal with the bosses that is also applicable to dealing with the tiny dictator of your own creation is:

– Explain that you can’t do multiple things at the same time. If possible, make them prioritize.
– Limit the choices you give them to just 2 or 3 things. Otherwise, it will take too long and they’ll come up with something crazy.
– There is great power in routine
– Lay the groundwork well in advance for any changes to the routine
– Catchphrases and jingles are your friends
– Celebrate the little things, like pooping in the potty. Sure, you figured it out a long time ago, but it’s important to validate their pride in doing something grown-up.

Set expectations, create a routine, and make sure you celebrate the little successes your local manager has. I’m quite sure these few steps will have you managing up your chain of command in no time at all.

The new old routine…

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As everyone knows by now, I’m a creature who enjoys habit. I may not quite run like clockwork, but some days it’s damned close. Work, mostly is just another routine. Get up, show up, do the time, and get the hell out. There’s a rhythm to it and even when the level of stupid is unmitigated, at least you know there’s (usual) a fixed end time to the suffering. My approach isn’t quite Zen, but at least it helps stave off the madness most of the time.

The problem today is that after ten days off I’d managed to set myself into a different routine. Sure I was still waking up two hours before the crack of dawn, but it was to do actual productive things like reading, cooking, general home repair, or tending the menagerie. What I wasn’t doing is answering emails that would be unnecessary if people read the whole memo, or going to meetings that could have been emails, or trying to look attentive when someone was talking about the most recent time they were visited by the Good Idea Fairy. I liked this new routine. The fact that I’ll invariably find something to tinker with, or read, or be curious about is one of the reasons I know I won’t go stir crazy in retirement. If I’m honest, nearly everything that interests me occurs naturally outside the scope of the office.

Fortunately I have the capacity to put up as good a front as anyone. I can play the game when it suits me. It exacts a terrible cost, though, in that playing my part and adjusting to this new old routine is absolutely exhausting.

Today I am that douchebag…

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I’ve spent a not insignificant part of my career railing against people who have meetings warning-stay-away-emitting-douchebag-2just to have meetings or the ones that could have been just an email. I run a standing Tuesday morning meeting. It’s been on the books for longer than I car to remember. Usually it lasts about 45 minutes, we hit the highlights of what changes took place in the last week, and we go our separate ways. I try very hard to never miss a chance to cancel it when there are so few changes from week to week that they can be easily pushed out as an email.

I fucked up today. I had a chance to cancel a meeting and I didn’t. Honestly, I basically forgot about it even being on the schedule until 30 minutes before it was supposed to start… and that’s only because Outlook stood up and told me I needed to dial in to the conference number. Because I spend my life online calling other people out, it’s only fair that I make this full and complete confessions of my sins.

Today I was the douchebag that held a meeting that could have easily been an email. I’m embarrassed and ashamed and have brought grave dishonor upon myself and my ancestors.

Christmas surprise, or Our watchword is indifference…

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Every year at this time, the powers that be are somehow perplexed and befuddled that they suddenly find themselves with far fewer people around than they expected to have at their desks. As a mostly dispassionate observer the fact that the office becomes a veritable ghost town the last two weeks of December no longer comes as a surprise to me. It’s as predictable as the rising and setting sun.

While other people are home hanging stockings with care, bosses are skittering across their newly emptied halls calling for updated briefing slides, impromptu meetings, and searching in vane for an action officer who’s three states away sucking down nog. That leaves we who remain mostly to roll our eyes. I saw a lot of that response today. As the days pass and the week draws towards its end the faces will get fewer, but the eye rolls definitely become more exaggerated. By Friday, they’ll be almost comic.

That’s the nature of the end of the year working for this beloved institution of ours. It’s adorable that people think projects are still getting undivided attention and people are spending their time building the perfect slide. I won’t blatantly say the watchword of the week is “disinterested,” but anyone who’s paying attention knows the score.

More stuff to do when you’re stuck in a staff meeting…

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1. Write down your grocery list
2. Brainstorm last minute Christmas gift ideas
3. Make notes about actual productive things you could be doing at your desk
4. Practice your advanced eye rolling skills
5. Contemplate your bad career/life decisions
6. Look thoughtfully into the distance and nod at appropriate intervals
7. Spend 15 seconds of this 90-minute hell actually talking about the one issue relevant to your job
8. Resist the temptation to live tweet the stupid people say in meetings
9. Play buzzword/gov-speak bingo
10. Remember to update the “Days Until Retirement” sign hanging in your cube

The moment I stopped caring…

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There are other people who do the things I do. Most of them do one or two of those things, but individually my skill sets are not particularly unique. What is unique, apparently, is my capacity to do all the things more or less at once. That doesn’t usually bother me far beyond my normal daily baseline level of thinking the world is going to hell in a handbag, but ​today is one of those rare exceptions that sent my blood pressure soaring to new and interesting levels.

I had the occasion today to observe a program that is about two thirds smaller in scope than just one of the projects I’m working on had been assigned a full time project manager, who was leading two full teams of subject matter experts developing content and managing logistics, and a full staff of support personnel. By contrast my own project has me and a pick up team of folks who make it to the meetings when it doesn’t interfere with something else they’re doing, where I’m managing my own logistics, and hoping that someone, somewhere might actually develop the content we’ve agreed needs to be developed.

Because as has been noted in this big green machine of ours, gripes go up the chain of command, I noted the discrepancy and opined that things might go better if we applied a few additional resources in the race down the home stretch. Given the time and manpower the collective “we” seem willing to throw at other projects, it didn’t feel like an unreasonable request.

If anyone wants to know the exact moment I stopped caring whether this mother turns out to be a success or failure, you can trace it directly back to that time that leadership shrugged and responded that, “well, you know life’s not fair.”

I’ve built a career on getting shit done on time and to standard, but you can damned well believe I’ll remember that one the next time someone calls wanting to pick my brain on a day off or comes around looking for me to pull another minor miracle out of an empty ruck sack.

On having no idea what’s going on…

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So here’s the thing… We’re all busy. We all have a lot of irons in the fire. We all have requirements competing for the limited amount of attention that we can provide. That’s OK. ​That’s the way it should be.

What isn’t OK, though is when you start using being busy as an excuse. When out of the thin blue you come online and start screaming about having not seen something before… something that has been sent to your inbox at least a dozen times over the last two months, that really tells me all I need to know. Yes I’m judging. I’m judging you and find you wanting.

It tells me that you haven’t bothered to get informed up until this point, which is fine, but don’t get that twisted. You’re not getting informed doesn’t have a damned thing to do with me. I’ve provided the information repeatedly. You’ve elected to ignore it. I hope you’ll find a way to forgive me if I don’t rend my garments in despair, because that’s all on you.

See, you’re not my rater. You’re not my senior rater. In fact you don’t appear anywhere in my rating chain at all. That makes your opinion interesting, but entirely irrelevant. Now that we’ve established that you’re not a special snowflake or a leading lite upon my firmament, let’s get out there any try to remember that keeping track of what’s going on is one of those pesky personal responsibilities… because my level of indifference to whether you know or not is nearly limitless.

A finite resource…

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It’s long been my opinion that three-day weekends are the best time to tack on extra vacation days. On a normal weekend, by the time the cooking, cleaning, and general upkeep is finished, it’s practically Monday. Extending that already long weekend into a 4th day, though, means time to get after some of the projects that never get to the top of the list during a normal weekend. This weekend, by example, was the first swing at bringing order to a basement that for the last 20 or so months has been not much more than a dumping ground for extraneous “stuff.” Now that it’s less prone to taking on water, the extra day gave me a chance to at least start turning the place into something useful. It’s going to take a few more days like that and a lot more shelving, but it’s started and that’s why I like the extra long weekend – they let me end a week feeling like something got accomplished.

Because every silver cloud has a lead lining, though, I couldn’t manage to escape the jackassery that is the American office. If I were a smarter man I wouldn’t have bothered checking the voicemail when I saw the number that left it. The boss calling two hours into your day off is never to tell you that there’s been a payroll problem and they’re crediting you with $50,000 in back pay. Still, curiosity got the best of me. Curiosity will, in all likelihood, eventually be a contributing if not a causal factor in my death.

Instead of an unexpected windfall the boss was letting me know that the uberboss called a “surprise” meeting Thursday morning, but that they couldn’t make any progress because I was the keeper of the particular nugget of institutional knowledge that they happened to need. Instead of pressing on with stiff upper lips, they decided they’d reconvene when I was back in the office on Monday. Except they won’t technically be reconvening when I’m “in” the office since the gods of Olympus decided to schedule the meeting after the end of my scheduled day.

It’s a small thing. A bare hiccup, really. The intrusion into what up until that point had been a blissfully quiet and content day off, however, was enough to twist my usual smirk into a decided sneer. My boss, knowing well my love of schedule and my grave distaste for hanging around after the close of business, did his best to spin the news – wondering if I could just come in late to offset the time at the end of the day. Wonderful, my reward for being the keeper of this particular bit of knowledge is that I get to jack up my day by coming in when traffic is at its worst, there’s no parking, and not going home until well after the sun has set. Excellent. Thanks for this outstanding opportunity to excel.

In and of itself, it’s nothing. What it represents, though, is much more significant and far more troubling. It’s an endemic situation where we continue to try cramming ten pounds of shit into a five pound bag. At least one other person should be as informed about my projects as I am, but we don’t have the manpower to provide that depth of coverage. There should never be a point at which someone at my decidedly junior level is able to foul up the works by simply taking a vacation day… and for the love of God, when you’ve put yourself in that position don’t expect that couple of good people you’ve got left to continually jump through their own ass to bail you out. Eventually the answer is going to be no.

Goodwill and desire to be a team player are a finite resource, especially when no one is doing a damned thing to refill the well.

Meeting notes…

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I wish I could tell you that I make some of this up just to have something to post, but the fact is most of it is “ripped from the headlines” of day to day life. Today’s post, for instance, comes directly from a meeting I happened to be stuck in for two hours last week.
Without exercising anything other than the most basic editorial control to allow for spelling, here’s what crosses my mind while I’m doing my best to look like an attentive and responsible adult:
– “We’re on your calendar to talk more about the calendar.” WTF? Really?
– Oh look, another meeting where the only output was lost time. Glad we didn’t accidentally do anything productive.

– Yeah, we have plenty of “management ‘tools'” around here already.

– It’s apparently time to play an exciting game of “Who the Fuck is on First?”

– Yes please, let’s add more training requirements because I’ve got nothing but free time.

– “We have a plan.” Yep. Been hearing that phrase for the last six months… still no plan.

– Yay! Let’s schedule another recurring meeting!!!!!1!

Seriously, folks, these are the only notes I took during that entire meeting. I’d have been happy to make note of anything that might have somehow been relevant to doing my job more effectively or efficiently, but that’s really not the purpose of these meetings. If you’re still trying to guage my level of my boredom, it’s best to imagine every other inch of the page filled with doodles… and then multiply how bored you think I was by a factor of three or four and then you’ll be in the neighborhood.

The deciders…

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When you’re sitting in a meeting with the great, good, and mighty, and one of them asks “Who approved that,” the correct answer is never “I did.” It results in a collection of blank stares, curled lips, angsty glances, and general twitchiness among the host assembled.

Yes, Virginia, I had the audacity to make a decision or two all on my own. I do it more often than they want to know, because it’s the only possible way to keep everything anywhere even close to on schedule. If we want to fall into the mode where the shading and font of every slide needs executive approval, you might as well fire my ass right now. Some decisions need made on the spot and unless someone directs me not to, I’m going to make them. I’m going to do it not so much based on any written authority, but based on the fact that I’ve got half a damned brain in my head and I’m reasonably good at what I do. If you feel that I need that kind of hand holding at every decision point, I’m serious, you really should replace me with someone more competent.

Look, I’m not vetoing bills and sending them back to the Hill. I’m not negotiating treaties with hostile powers. I’m not offering to cut entire weapons systems out of our portfolio. I’m deciding what slide template looks best when projected on a 50-foot screen and how many reserved seats we’re going to need. It’s the operative definition of nug work. It’s the sort of thing that should be well below the notice of those wielding profound executive authority.

I didn’t want to be the point man on this team, but someone gave me a task and told me to get it done. I’ll do exactly that, but it would be one hell of a lot easier if we could stop tripping all over ourselves. Believe me when I say if I hit a snag, or when the decisions needed are truly above my pay grade, I’ll be the very first to go screaming for help.