Just strip off the closest fat white guy’s shirt and use his back.
Mind the hair.
Cue hysterical laughter.
Clearly you have never worked with a Japanese business. Or a German one. Or, come to think of it, an Italian business. And I’ve never heard an English worker refer to his boss with a first name either. (Though that’s been about 15 years ago now.) The Russians I worked with were flat terrified (like Tony Sporano terrified) of their bosses.
Yeah, no. I’d say the most laid back I’ve experienced were the Australians, and certain American companies which self-described as “flat” organizations.
See, once again I see that misperception that many junior employees often have. THEY don’t get to decide what is “no big deal”. The boss does.
As a manager, I don’t want to “wait two minutes” while you fetch a whiteboard that should have been there in the first place, print out the last few copies of a document that should have been ready an hour ago, casually mention some screw up you knew about a month ago when we could have done something about it or are simply just late because you were doing something that apparently you think is more important than our meeting. I’m not going to scream and rant like a crazy person. But it isn’t going to endear you to me as someone who I want to see rise in the organization.
No, fuck that. There’s no “deciding” about it. Something is either objectively important or it isn’t. A boss mistakenly thinking something is important when it isn’t is a faiure of the boss.
If the whiteboard is so important to you, get it your fucking self. Don’t be an asshole to coworkers about shit that doesn’t matter.
Once again, I find myself aligned with msmith537 - there is a clear line between fauning inappropriately and demonstrating efficiency and responsiveness.
And thinking that this is a U.S. phenomenon only is flat-out wrong…
…and a whiteboard is tool, again per **msmith **- knowing how to facilitate a group, especially a high-performing group of execs or managers, it a craft skill that most people don’t have, white board or not…
You’re the kind of boss everyone hates. People make mistakes.
Ok, but since your job description (or Argent’s in this case) consists of setting stuff up that the big boss needs, now that we’ve upwardly delegated that task to the big boss, we no longer have need of you. kthxbye.
What next, the guy needs to install his own OS? Order his own computer? Fetch his own lunch? He has PEOPLE for that, since his time is best spent doing something else, at least accordnig to the company.
I know you’re a fan of the bible, so maybe you remember the parable where the folks who did well with small tasks (like remembering to have the whiteboard) were rewarded with larger responsibilities. Argent’s manager was given a small task, and it reflected poorly on her that she was unable to complete it in time for the meeting with the VP. Sure, no big deal, a couple minutes lost. Except there are people who nail the small details every time, and those will be the ones the VP looks at a little more favorably come promotion time.
Sure they do. Then they take responsibility for the mistakes and apologize. They don’t then blame their boss for worshipping an exec because they failed to meet a deadline or forgot to do a task. They don’t blame the boss exec for being upset that something he asked for was not provided because someone dropped the ball.
They say “I dropped the ball, I’m sorry.”
Even bosses make mistakes. Even execs make mistakes. MOST bosses will actually forgive you for those mistakes if they are not frequent AND you take responsibility for them. Bosses that don’t, are indeed, worthy of being disliked - but until you find a different job or they get fired, they are likely to retain the power even if they suck at being a boss.
Perhaps the reason the VP wasn’t available to get the whiteboard was because she was in another meeting defending the budget of your department.
It is almost always a good idea to have the lowest paid person do something instead of a higher paid one, assuming they can both do it equally well. This is what delegation is all about. One of Jimmy Carter’s weaknesses as president is that he did stuff like schedule the White House tennis courts himself. (According to rumor, at least.) No matter how rich and important you are, there are only 24 hours per day, and making best use of them is something that execs have to learn to do.
This is exactly the most valuable piece of advice we gave to our kids. You may think something is a crap job, but there is a good chance that the person who assigned it to you didn’t. Do the crap jobs well, maybe do them better than expected, and you get the good ones. Screw up the crap jobs, and why would anyone ever give you a good one?
Organizationally, to point out the very obvious, shit rolls downhill. The manager wants to impress the director who wants to impress the executive director who wants to impress the VP who wants to impress the CEO. The CEO may casually toss out some minor mandate concerning a policy they’d like to see improved (say, let’s dress better in the workplace). As it passes down through each level of management, it acquires 10% more stringency so the inferior can impress the superior. Hence, when the fecal bolus is finally done rolling down Mount Shit, it has gained an unbelievable amount of momentum.
Culturally speaking, executives are worshipped when they have a great deal of power over someone’s life. In European countries, there’s a lot more job security, there’s social medicine, and they’re more diligent savers than Americans. Unlikely that they’ll get fired on a whim, and if they do, they’ll just live off social medicine, the dole, and savings for a while. Not so in the US. Japan is like Europe, but over there a secure job means everything to one’s social status, so executives over there are gods likewise.
Another phenomenon is the way Americans fetishize material wealth and upward class mobility, especially among the middle class. People are obsessed with a future which in fact most will never achieve, but few want to torpedo it outright by getting a bad name among the ruling class.
One of these “failures” is going to get one of us fired. Guess which one?
If I say it matters, then it matters. If I ask you to perform a business related task, I’m not telling you to do it for the fuck of it.
Telling your staff to do something is not “being an asshole”. It’s being a boss. The problem is that there are a lot of people (like you presumably) who apparantly don’t feel they should have anyone tell them what to do. Well the way you get to a position where people don’t have to tell you what to do is you do stuff without having to be told.
And they should accept the consequences of those mistakes.
Whether my team hates me is irrelevant (although I’m pretty sure they don’t). My teams clearly understand what I expect and why I expect it. I understand that people make mistakes. There is a difference between making a mistake in good faith and not doing your job because you are insubordinate, incompetant or simply “don’t feel it’s important”. And when you make a mistake, I expect you to own up to it, take steps to correct the mistake and work to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
This is what I love about this board. You have people who will bitch for 20 pages about how the economy or their mean old boss or their stupid “cow-orkers” are keeping them down. But then they bitch about not doing what their boss tells them because they think its stupid or how they have no interest in putting in extra time, extra effort or going the extra mile to get a job done or even attempting to try and make a good impression. Agent Foxtrot your meeting with your boss and the VP is a chance for you to make a good impression and get some recognition. Instead of putting in a little extra effort to make sure everything goes smoothly, you dropped the ball. Mostly, from what I can tell, because you don’t care and didn’t think it was important.
You aren’t mentioning one of your obligations, which is to understand the root cause of the mistake and helping the person not repeat it. Mistakes are often a great opportunity for education - my old thesis adviser and my first boss both transformed mistakes I made into learning opportunities, teaching me something I’ve followed ever since and taught to others. If the person can’t learn from a mistake or doesn’t want to learn, then that’s a learning opportunity for you. It is clear that a lot of people on this board have no clue about why it makes perfect sense for a VP to delegate the job of getting a whiteboard. It remains to see about the learning part.
yes…
20 years ago. Huge company (think Dow Chemicals). Senior managers wore suits.The engineers wore a shirt and tie, (but no suit.) The lab techs who reported to the engineers wore jeans and t-shirts under their lab coats.
One day a new and eager technician joined my lab. He had a tie and collared shirt on under his lab coat.So the most senior department head in the building told him not to wear a tie, “because it might get caught in the heavy machinery.” There was no heavy machinery in his chemical lab.
Not necessarily. The people above you may well note this and decide (probably correctly) that you are NOT a good manager of people.
Or the people who hate you may decide to sabotage you or take other steps (such as discussing your shortcomings with other management people they are on good terms with) that will inhibit your career.
You are probably glad you don’t work for me. Hell, I’m glad you don’t work for me.
In some jobs that’s very true. A lot of organizations do surveys about bosses. Employees score their managers, and managers have to do well in order to get more employees - and if they do poorly they are not going anywhere - unless maybe on the layoff list.
In other organizations, it isn’t true. You are expected to manage by fear. Or your style isn’t watched at all.
I prefer the ones where managers are expected to manage. Not be friends with their employees, but be friendly enough that their employees go the extra mile because they WANT to. I think managers who operate by fear get less out of their staff long term. With my own resources (I’m a project manager, so I’m not responsible for anyone’s raises - but I am responsible for the task list assigned to them), I do try and actively coach, I do try and motivate with praise and appreciation instead of fear and stay friendly.
But there have been resources assigned to me where that has not been a successful strategy. Which makes me say - from the other side of the fence - if everyone hates the boss - its probably the boss. If the boss seems to have it out for you - take a look at yourself. It may be personal - but it also may be that you weren’t performing if merely “asked” to do something.
Heck, I wish that folks who said such things would work for our competitors!
My boss in my old job (or what I like to think of as my interim job between my last real job) tried to manage out of fear. More likely she was just insane (bipolar or something) and would just go into screaming fits. That doesn’t work. What am I supposed to be afraid of? That some old lady will scream at me some more? That I’ll lose some job I hate anyway?
And I shouldn’t have to manage using fear. If I need to force you to do your job, I really don’t want you working for me. I want people who do their job well because they want to do it well. And for those people, I will help them as much as I can.
How often did you hear an English boss refer to his workers by first name?