RM> Often management is a victim of the "Peter Principal.
> There are a couple of definitions of that but the one I refer to is
> that a person will rise in a company to just beyond the level of their
> competence, suggesting Most managers are incompetent at their jobs.
CO>Not trying to be contentious, but instead of watching and talking
>about the situation - is there something you would do differenty if
>you were the one in charge?
CO>In a lot of places, what I would see is people sitting on the
>sidelines complaining about how the business was being managed, but
>never really stepping up to try and change things in a better way.
Have you ever tried to tell your boss that he's doing something wrong?
And the problem with incompetent bosses is they are paranoid about losing
their jobs so they will either ignore you, tell you to shut up, or try to
get rid of you in case higher-ups realize there is someone smarter than
them available to do the job.
I say all that with a smile. I didn't intend for it to sound confrontatonal
with you since I agree with your basic idea. A few times I've run into
this sort of thing and usually ended up deciding to forget it, just do the
job and let the boss sink or swim on how he runs things.
A Good boss is another story. One place I worked we got a sudden, panic
order come in from a very important customer and my boss came to me in
the plant and told me what the order was for and then paused and said,
'I have no idea how anyone could possibly do this in the time we have
to do it..'
I told him to leave it to me and I'd find a way, and he did that rather
than trying to micro-manage how I did the work. I did manage it, basically
doing about 8 or 10 hours of production in 5 hours.
After that he always just left things to me where a worse boss would have
just said, 'Well obviously you can do a lot more work in a day that we
thought', and would try to get you to half kill yourself all the time.
I later ended up running that department and, although other managers in
the company hated it, I'd let my people goof around when things were quiet
because then they would work at 120% when it was required. If you push
people to work hard all the time, they just set a slower constant pace.
In the end I stopped working for other people by the time I was 32. If you
are your own boss you only have to answer to the customers and, in most
of the jobs I did, my customers actually paid me more than I asked for so
that I would be readily available for them when they needed me again.
---
■ SLMR Rob ■ You get more with a smile AND a gun than a smile alone
■ Synchronet ■ CAPCITY2 * capcity2.synchro.net * Telnet/SSH:2022/Rlogin/HTTP
|
