Argument Builds Relationships

     This guy startled me.

     We had disagreed, and then I described in greater detail what I meant. He listened. Then he said, “You’re right. Now I see your point, and I agree.” I was really nonplussed. That had never happened to me before.

     I came from a large, very verbal family, and one thing we never did was give in on an argument. If the words didn’t work, even in waves of escalated volume and intensity, we tended to get physical. Growing into the larger world, and learning to keep it strictly verbal, I discovered that most people are not accustomed to debate as sport, or even as instructive.

People, Process, Resistance, Management

     The manager said to me, wistfully, "If it weren't for the people, this job would be perfect." He was responsible for the work of nine people.

     The problem was, of course, that the people WERE the job. The process he was conducting did not exist without the nine people. The manager was superb as an individual user of the system, but not as a leader of the people.

     This made for a tough place to work. A perfectionist in charge of people whose presence, in his mind, messed up his beloved process.

Big Project: My Career

     The nurse was showing the newborn to the daddy. “It’s a manager!” she was saying, much as we would announce, “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!”

     It was a cartoon I saw a long time ago, but the effect lingers in the mind. We operate too often on the apparent assumption that our work performance and professional position are not really up to us.

    Whatever came with us at birth, or has been given to us since by the wisdom and goodwill of others, is what we have for a job, seems like. We credit happenstance or lucky chance more than our own conscious effort.

     I’ve known a few people who didn’t buy that concept. All of them have been admirable . . . and successful.

How We Delegate

     The boss sent me to a car dealership to collect an overdue debt.

     You know, of course, that you are not in the presence of naïvete when you’re at the car showroom. In this case, it also was not helpful that my purpose was to get the manager to part with cash for a service whose value had long since faded into a bygone time. The guy owed us for newspaper advertising we had published much earlier.

     Needless to say, I came back emptyhanded. “Well,” said the boss, “Did you ask them for use of a car, then?”

Don't Delegate? Can't Manage

“If you want something done right, do it yourself.”

     True or false?

     That depends. If you’re a champion individual contributor, it’s true as can be. If you’re trying to be a good manager, it’s profoundly false.

     It depends upon your definitions, too. What is the “something” in the saying, and what is meant by “done right.”?

     If you’re charged with performing a task yourself, then the measurement of successful completion of it arises from how well you performed the actions that produced the desired result. If you carried the work out in an excellent fashion, you’re a champ.

     If, on the other hand, you are responsible for having the task done and are given personnel to do that sort of thing, you’re failing to do your job if you do the work yourself. The fact that you might have done it superbly is irrelevant. It wasn’t your job to do the work – it was your job to see that someone else did it.

Project Planning? Fiction

     The guy at the neighborhood meeting was livid.

     “Just do what you said you were going to do!” he shouted at the developer. His two dozen or so neighbors all sounded their “Yeah!” They were fed up.

     They had bought their lots and contracted for homes to be built in this planned development sited on a big vacant field in the city. They were promised features including a pleasant pond surrounded by their nice little residences.

     Development had gone slowly. Most of the additional homes went up. The muddy track became a quarter-mile roadway, paved, center circle and all.

Stuart Smalley, Dilbert & the Project Manager

     “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and doggone it people LIKE me!”

     That’s the mantra “Stuart Smalley” used to intone while staring at himself in a mirror on Saturday Night Live.

     I loved the Al Franken parody, although it mocked a behavior management process I have worked with since I became a personal productivity consultant in the late 1980s. I felt the same about Scott Adams’ skewering of managers and project management in the Dilbert comic.

     In both cases, the genius of the satirists may have popularized their mockery to greater public effect than all the training, speaking and authoring of mere mortals who take those subjects seriously.