Help! I've been ordered to give a very senior colleague criticism!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Jeez, I’ve been stewing about this all weekend.

A very senior colleague of mine (Let’s call him “Jim”) was asked to present some data last Friday. This is a big project he’s been working on, for over a year. Short story - he never bothered in his long career to learn how to do this effectively. The sales team was furious upon receiving an amateurish, unformatted, messy, incomprehensible Excel abortion.

Here’s where it gets bad.

Our VP saw it too. He was just as angry. He laid down the law - “Have GameHat look it over. He’s a good impartial observer, since he hasn’t worked on this project. If he can’t understand it, none of us can. And if he can’t, then redo it. You have until Tuesday. And use him as an expert, he’s good at this sort of thing.”

So now, despite being completely innocent, I’m involved.

I took a look at it Friday afternoon. And it’s worse than what I’d feared. See, I know Jim was worthless at presenting data. Most of his career he’s had secretaries or whatever to do so. My hope was that it was just a messy table, and that I could simply clean it up myself.

But this shit is truly incomprehensible. Jim not only has no idea how to make a basic table, he seems to have missed the course on even the basic understanding of:

[ol]
[li]Know what people are asking[/li][li]Present what is most important to them[/li][/ol]

So I’m stuck. Jim and I get along ok, but I know that he has a pretty low opinion of my work simply because, well, he was in the industry before I was even born.

It seems to me I’ve got two options:

[ol]
[li]The scorched-earth option - tell Jim straight out, his presentation is shit. No professional should have ever even thought this was acceptable. Hell, any one of my college professors would have ripped it up in his face, told him to do it over, and given him an ‘F’[/li]
[li]Try to help him understand that’s it’s shit, and try to help him fix it.[/li][/ol]

I’d much rather go with option 2, but I have no idea how to get him to take me seriously. If you were 65, would you listen to a 30-year-old tell you your work was garbage? This is the problem.

How can I respectfully get him to understand that he is doing a shit job? And how can I respectfully help him?

2

That’s a really, really difficult situation to be put in, because if you halfass it, the VP will then have YOUR balls on the table and it’ll all go from there.

I have no clue, but I’m in here to commiserate and if I do think of something I’ll pop back in and share my thoughts. I hope someone can give you a hand soon.

3

Does Jim know that his presentation came under criticism? Is the Tuesday deadline something he’s aware of?

4

Yes he does, he was ordered to fix it in no uncertain terms.

The best approach I’ve found for this kind of situation is a prepared Socratic approach: first question, from what you say, is “what information do these people need to know?” I wouldn’t be surprised if Jim didn’t even know the difference between information and data. It’s a painful process for sure.

5

Laaalala… stares at the ceiling, can’t see the post right above this one

Yes he does, he was ordered to fix it in no uncertain terms.

Given his age, I would begin by asking him what does he want to do: would you rather have you explain how to do it himself, or would he rather have you prepare the data for him? (be his secretary for a day). The first approach is more painful and longer - but if he’s not retiring any time soon, the second one has the downfall that any further data-presentation screwups on his part will be your fault and probably end up yours to fix.

The best approach I’ve found when teaching someone my senior (my high-level customers) or who has been doing for years the job I am now there to change (100% of my customers) has been a prepared Socratic approach: first question, from what you say, is “what information do these people need to know?” I wouldn’t be surprised if Jim didn’t even know the difference between information and data. It’s a painful process for sure; it’s not always asking questions, but asking a question, getting a meaningful response, explaining how to achieve the objective with the (new) tools. As a consultant, I do it day in, day out; with most people, once I’ve gone through the Q&A format a couple of times they come to a point where they trust me enough that I can just jump to the explanations part.

6

Simply take a dispassionate approach to decribe the situation as it is, and any recommendations you can provide. Don’t add any editorial about the quality or the people involved.

Another approach is to feign illness. These things can turn out very bad.

7

How can such a project possibly be overhauled by Tuesday?

8

That’s obvious. **GameHat **and Mr. I-Can’t-Present-Information had 4 days to work on this from the time the VP told them to fix it.

Weekend? Whattayamean, weekend?

FWIW, GameHat, you have my sympathies. That’s a hell of a position to be put in. Listen to Nava, she has good advice.

9

To me the OP seemed a bit ambiguous on this point. It sounded as if the VP might have been making a general pronouncement to the department, not necessarily telling Jim that “Jim, YOU have to fix this by Tuesday.”

If this happened in my own company, and I were in the OP’s shoes, I’d be concerned this might be the VP’s underhanded way of putting the burden of getting this done all on me (and none of the credit, of course).

Who is more indispensible to the VP in the event of a further cock-up come Tuesday - the very senior guy, or the young IT whiz? Again to me it looks like red flags and danger signs all over this thing.

10

Get the baggage out of the way first: “You know that people are very unhappy with your presentation. They want me to work with you to improve it. It’s not that you did a bad job on the project, just that your presentation did not show your work off to its best advantage. So let’s sit down and go over how you can do this.”

With each bit of data, ask him, “What are you trying to show here?” When he explains it to you, then say, “Good. Then we’ll write that.” People often can do a good job of explaining things by talking about them, but fail when trying to put it onto paper.

11

One trick I use in this situation is to try and present it as “you and me against the audience”. As in, “Jim, I get what you’re saying and I think it’s great, but you have to remember the audience isn’t as bright as you are. Let’s figure out a way to say it more simply.” and “Jim, I realize that you labeling the data in the first slide, but remember that the audience doesn’t have a very long attention span, so let’s make sure that every slide is labeled.”

12

If the thing is due tomorrow, it seems to me you only have one option: Fix it and CC a copy to Jim & the VP. The VP will be pleased that you solved his problem. Jim will be pissed off but that’s his problem. He started this mess. He can go take Excel lessons on his own time.

13

Monday update: Reprieve from a few unlikely sources!

Well, it’s Monday. I went into work feeling sick to my stomach. But things quickly got better.

Without me even saying anything, the engineer who did a lot of the testing for Jim caught our VP on the way into his office. He shut the door, then read the VP the riot act about Jim being frankly unprofessional, and how he was sick of wasting his own time doing hours of high-quality testing only to see it come to nothing because the whole project was poorly designed. Which the project is, but more on that later. Regardless, the VP is now aware from two sources (sales and technical) that Jim’s work is a problem.

…not to denigrate Jim, he has a few things that he’s very good at and many years experience. But his generational attitude seems to be - “my job is X. Anything other than X is not my problem. I’m not going to learn it and I’m not going to do it.” As a salaried professional that simply doesn’t fly today.

Next - I guess the VP also sent a quiet note to Jim’s manager (who is not the VP, but is happily an older guy.) Jim’s manager gently sat down with Jim and explained a few things that needed to be in the presentation. “The sales guys are asking for Y, so Y should be what you present most clearly”

The result - by the time I got in, Jim was already working on the spreadsheet. I got the updated thing around lunch.

It’s still pretty bad. But it looked like Jim was at least hearing the criticism, and it was a little bit better. So I was able to sit down with him after lunch and offer mostly constructive criticism.

“Hm, It makes sense that you put this relevant data at the top. But do the sales guys need to know about (irrelevant data)? Maybe put that in the appendix.”

“Heh, I always have trouble reading lots of long strings of decimals. Besides, the uncertainty on these tests are much greater. Let me show you how to truncate decimals in Excel so it’s easier on the eyes”

"I see you’ve copied some Excel data from another source. It’s in a completely different font.

:rolleyes:

Let’s make the whole thing the same font so it looks cleaner."

The presentation also got pushed back until Thursday.

The shit is still going to hit the fan on Thursday. If I could, I honestly would clean up his presentation and make it sparkly. But, as my fellow engineer complained, the project was poorly designed. Some important and highly relevant data simply hasn’t been collected. This is largely due to Jim simply refusing to listen to sales.

Sales: “Our customers care about Z. Test a bunch of products and rate their Z.”

Jim: “Nope. I’ve been testing Q since 1975! So I’ll present Q.”

But at least now I can honestly say I made an honest effort. And I hope that with both sales and technical complaining loudly about Jim the VP will give me a pass.

14

Just to clarify, I’m not IT, I’m an engineer. I happen to be the Excel “whiz” simply because people had computers when I went to college. :stuck_out_tongue:

…though I am pretty ace with it.

Many of my colleagues learned on slide rules, graph paper and old-school memos.

15

While the kind and gentle approach can work, if someone is generally a stubborn mule I’ve found the brutal method of hitting them between the eyes, and telling them politely and dispassionately their work is unacceptable shit generally works best. In this context you need to explain very precisely why it’s shit. If they understand their professional reputation or their business is on the line they become very attentive and proactive, grateful even.

I have only done this with men. I suspect this approach would not work all that well with women.

16

You need to make sure that the right people know that you did what you could with what you had, but do it in a way that’s not seen as trashing the older guy.

Not a lot of fun, but I hope it works out.

Also, good job on being known by the VP as the Go To Guy for presentations.