Tag Archives: leadership

General alarm…

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For the record, when the building is locked down and employees have been told to “shelter in place,” it’s not a good idea to send people out of the designated safe zones to track down people elsewhere in the building. We have these fancy things called telephones on our desks that are like search parties, but not as apt to end up getting you smashed on the head or eviscerated by flying debris. Also, your senior staff and supervisors all are issued cell phones/blackberries. Texting and email works pretty well on those even when you can’t get a call out. Plus, you’re paying like $10k a month for them so why not given them a workout?

I won’t even go into how we heard nothing from your vaunted security and operations staff. MIA. The whole time we were locked down. I have to admit that telling the director of the organization with which we share the building that we didn’t want to talk to them about what went well and what didn’t was a nice touch… Especially since we’re technically their tenant. I mean we certainly wouldn’t want to consider ways we could do things more effectively in the future. Way to make friends and influence people. The two senior people in the building continuing their urination contest during a period of crisis is sure to fill the workforce with a sense of confidence in their leaders. Nice work, Captain Queeg.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of previously de-published blogs appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

ESP…

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Contrary to popular belief, I don’t have ESP, clairvoyance, or the ability to teleport back in time to set right things that once went wrong. When an email sits in your inbox for 12 days and misses a key suspense to echelons higher than reality, no matter how frantic you sound at my desk, I can’t magically manufacture correctly updated data for you to use in a report. If it was due on the 8th and it’s now the 11th, you’re pretty much hosed no matter how brilliant I make the numbers look.

I’m not going to point out that you, as the high and mighty Uberboss, have two administrative assistants who sit right outside your door and are theoretically supposed to keep track of your email and calendar. I know the three of you are probably overwhelmed by the number of messages slipping stealthily into your inbox undetected. Email is sneaky like that. New messages are rarely boldly highlighted in any way and it’s so easy to overlook the little red exclamation point… or the fact that the message title turned red when it was close to becoming past due.

I know your wandering around issuing a slightly different version of the same random task to every third person who’s unfortunate enough to cross your path keeps you awfully busy, but Uberboss or not, when you behave like a petulant child, that’s pretty much how you’re going to be treated.
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Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of previously de-published blogs appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Happy birthday: or Here’s your letter of depreciation…

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My birthday is right around the corner and there’s no way I’d rather celebrate than by receiving a condescending form letter from the executive suite telling me how great an opportunity it is for me to be a part of the team. Seriously? I’m sure that someone at echelons above reality thought that this sounded like a good idea. A real morale booster for the Uberboss to “recognize” the line employees’ ability to stay alive and employed for another year while reminding them “how good they have it.” Yep. That’s the ticket!

When you combine the condescension with the truly monumental management failures we’ve see on a daily basis, it’s really more like a letter of depreciation than anything else. If you really want to congratulate me, how about a “59 minutes” and letting me head home early to celebrate my “big day” in the company of people who actually give a rat’s ass. That I’d appreciate.

But your letter? You can go ahead stuff that in your inbox.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of previously de-published blogs appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Plan? What plan?

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I’ve seen some jacked up things in my time with Uncle Sam, but nothing in that time even comes close to the inability of senior departmental officials to communicate even the most basic of information to the workforce. The same workforce they’ll be asking in a few hours to execute a currently unknown plan to shut down a very large portion of the department. Surely at this stage there’s a plan, right? I mean it’s been in a file somewhere collecting dust since the early 1980s and occasionally trotted out and updated once or twice a decade since then under circumstances very similar to these. All I’m suggesting is that hows and whats of standing down the department shouldn’t really be a surprise to you at this point.

One of the things they beat into our heads at Army school way back in 2003 was that leadership is mostly about taking care of people. That and not losing too many things. Losing things is considered bad form in a leader and is frowned upon. From what I’ve observed from the belly of the beast over the last four days, not one member of Official Washington has shown anything passing for a shred of leadership ability… or really displayed any redeeming social value whatsoever.

Essential…

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In light of what seems to be an impending shutdown of the United States Government (yeah, Congress, I’m looking at you), there has been much discussion about what makes one an “essential” part of the workforce. Air traffic controllers? Yeah, makes sense. Nuclear submariner? Yep, you make the cut. But where the line of essential stops, there is a vast gray area of things that seem important, but no one can say for certain that they are technically speaking, essential to public safety.

That being said, there’s something profoundly disheartening about getting the official email that not only are you nonessential, but so is your entire office and everyone else in your building for that matter. In fact, you’re so nonessential that when the funds run out, you’re going to turn the lights out, lock the doors, and just walk away. It does give someone given to a somewhat cynical outlook reason to ponder what that could really mean in the teeth of exploding deficits and a Tea Party that seems to want a federal government that operates under the Article of Confederation.

It’s fair to say that my PowerPoints aren’t going to put an end to the war(s) or inspire an economic rally, but I have a secret, unredeemed belief that with the right (or any actual) leadership, both here locally and at the highest levels things do not have to be as they now are. If not essential, we can certainly be productive… but only when we have leaders worthy of good and faithful followers.

It’s still friggin’ freezing in here…

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The thirty-day hiring freeze and 30-day extension are now something on the order of 65 days old. Now of course there’s some logic to waiting to see if the jackrabbits in Congress can actually manage to pass a budget before sending us all home on Friday, but maybe a word of “hey, standby. We’ll let you know after Friday” would be better than the overpowering silence coming from the civilian personnel office. It’s the 10-ton elephant in the room that they refuse to address other than referring back to a memo put out over two months ago.

If you’re going to extend it, just announce that already so we can get busy retooling our resumes for jobs outside DOD. If it’s going to be dropped, how about a scientific guesstimate of when they machinery of civilian hiring might start moving again. Even with the cynicism that I usually bring to the table when discussing issues of competent leadership at pay grades above reality, I can’t believe that the decision hasn’t already been made somewhere about whether it’s time to fish or cut bait. Of course I could be completely wrong about that and the denizens of that five-sided concrete cobweb could be even more jacked up than I thought possible.

The total tonnage of backlog that’s going to exist after continuing to make announcements and conduct interviews, but not make selections is certainly going to be enough to stun a mule team in its tracks… Especially considering that mules are a damned sight easier to work with than the personnel office. Let it run another month or two and I’ll be dropping retirement papers before they manage to get it cleared up. Pay freeze, hiring freeze, and no budget in sight… It’s getting very hard to love working for Uncle.

Welcome douchbag…

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We’re getting a visit from one of our regional managers. That’s not really unusual. It seems there’s always one of them wandering around the building for some reason or another. This visit is only special because the manager in question is pretty much a giant douchebag. That’s actually speculative on my part because the guy has never actually bothered to show up or call in for any of the regional managers meetings that have been scheduled in the six months he’s worked for us. So really I don’t know anything about him other than he doesn’t do meetings, or return phone calls, or think policy applies to him. Come to think of it, I’m pretty ok with standing firm on my assessment of douchebag.

The issue isn’t so much one of the guy being off the reservation most of the time as it is that no one in a position to do anything about it seems to a) know it or b) feel compelled to take action. That’s just a solitary example of why having actual leaders in leadership positions might actually be important. You’d think by now I’d have developed a better ability to manage my expectations. It’s probably best to just go back to my cube, keep my head down, and get the day over with with as little increase in my blood pressure as possible.

Do you think hanging up a “Welcome Douchebag” banner in front of the building would be considered somehow inappropriate?

Editorial Note: This is part of a continuing series of previously unattributed posts appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Respect the rank, not the person…

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We’re the government and no self respecting government agency goes more than a day or two without having a meeting. Mostly, given our slightly inconvenient location just outside of BFE, we keep our meetings to ourselves. Sadly, though, there are times when someone vaguely approaching the definition of a VIP shows up. Such an arrival, of course, requires a meeting befitting the distinguished status of the guest. That means the development of many, many wonderful charts… because the more charts presented for your consideration, the more important you are in the hierarchy. And then there’s the hardcopy – because a VIP apparently can’t be troubled to remember something from one minute to the next without having a fist full of paper slides in front of him. Reading the ones projected across the room onto a 8×10 foot screen would certainly be below his esteemed level of dignity.

With enough notice, it’s generally possible to make anything happen. Deciding at 8:30 that you want to change half the slides for a meeting starting in half an hour, sure, that’s manageable. But for God’s sake don’t come back ten minutes later and tell everyone they’re late to the meeting… that isn’t supposed to start for another twenty minutes. And then pace the aisle sighing and making comments under your breath about being unprepared. When the only thing keeping someone from beating you to death with a keyboard is an ingrained sense of respect for rank and a desire not to go to jail, it seems best not to antagonize that many of your underlings all at one time.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Doing it on webcam…

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I work for a guy who likes to think his time as a system administrator in the late 1990s qualifies him as an authority on issues of office technology. If those of us with a passing awareness of tech, this is a very bad situation. It means we’re in a position of being forced to agree with ideas and recommendations that are not only expensive, but also doomed to sink into the befuddled mire of advanced middle-age angst over technology that is one of the defining characteristics of our “leadership cadre.”

Two years ago, we were instructed to buy two dozen webcams and run a test with our agency’s behind-the-firewall proprietary knockoff version of Skype. The test was, as I described it at the time, less than successful and we recommended shelving the project. Most of our test bunnies couldn’t figure out how to plug in their cameras and of the ones that did, only a handful managed to actually use them. I’m pretty sure they just ate the microphones we sent them. To be fair, I should point out that this failure wasn’t completely the fault of the doddering soon-to-be retirees. The network infrastructure in our building was something less than robust enough to handle the “load” of several simultaneous streaming audio/video connections. It was sort of fun to say something, run to the office across the hall and see yourself “in real time,” but we decided that wasn’t going to be a real plus-up to our collective productivity. After the abysmal initial test, I assumed the idea was left to die quietly in desk drawers and file cabinets around the country. As is so often the case, I was wrong.

I discovered last week that we ordered 50 more webcams to be issued to all of our field offices to “improve communication” and “facilitate meeting online,” since the organization doesn’t have money for our traditional cross-country boondoggles these days. Now, if I had even the slightest notion that any of these devices was actually going to be used, I’m all for outfitting every computer in the office. It would be great to have one official feature on my work computer that I’ve been using for free from Google for years. My concern is only that we already find it nearly impossible to get our “leaders” to pick up the 100 year old pice of tech that’s already on their desk and talk to one another or call in for a teleconference. I have no idea what makes us think we’ll be able to get them to use “magic” to talk across the intertubes?

Then again, it might be fun to watch them try.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

PowerPoint Service Announcement…

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I get it. I’m a PowerPoint Ranger. I’ve got my 5000 hour tab. I can rock the old school black on white or jam it with 100 megs of media content. We can do those things. We *can* destroy the network with the sheer size of our files. We have the technology – Thought technically, I suppose I have the technology. I wouldn’t use my POS employer-issued Dell to build such a piece of work, but I digress.

Friends, my point is that if you’re not on your guard, PowerPoint will slip in and destroy you in the night. You’ll start off with version one and two. A few days later, you’ll find yourself at version 8. Out of nowhere, version 16 rises from the early morning mist… surely version 17 is only a day away. I can only warn you that no good ever came from double digit versions. Down that path lies only ruin. It’s too late for me, but you, you can save yourselves.

I urge all of you – just say no to multi-version PowerPoints. No good can come from them. Be proud of your tabs – but only use your skills for good. The path to PowerPoint glory will tempt you, but never, ever forget that with those tabs, comes great responsibility. Use them wisely.