Thank you, Nava, that’s helpful!
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Yeah, I have to agree with Nava. It sounds like you are on a particularly shitty project. Sounds almost as bad as my last client. Certainly a lot of similar problems. But the main issue with that project was that I was brought in as a contract project manager on a project that was already failing and behind what I assume would have been its schedule.
What I would suggest is that you spend more time “managing upward”. What that means is that figuring out ways to make your work visible to your manager and other key stakeholders. And I don’t just mean bullshit status reports. What I mean is if you need a day or two to get up to speed on certain activities, make that clear and fit it into your schedule. Try to cancel or postpone meetings where you do not feel you have a clear reason for being there and see about rescheduling or cancelling standing meetings where you are back to back with other meetings preventing you from making adequate preparations.
Then again, this might just be your company’s culture. Some places seem to thrive on having their people in back to back meetings where nothing gets done, yet everyone promises to get stuff done.
Maybe it’s your company’s culture, but to me handing off tasks to someone else means you don’t need to review the work, except maybe the first time or two.
If you review something and send it up, and they send it back with changes, it was a waste of time to review it. Just send it up and say “tell me what you need”.
I hear you about the meetings. “Let’s have a meeting to discuss why we aren’t getting anything done”, when “why we aren’t getting anything done” is because we have too many meetings. Is it possible to do meeting via phone, so you can actually get some work done while everyone else drones on?
Regards,
Shodan
Thanks, msmith537. The meetings and status reports aren’t that bad - but I have been on projects that were that bad. This project seems to have just enough meetings and status reports to keep me from reviewing documents and catching up with things. Last week was the end of the month, so the weekly, bi-weekly, other bi-weekly, and monthly reports all hit at once. I’ll try to convince my leadership that this is too many reports. I won’t put money on that, but I’ll try.
I’m in a new area of IT for me, and I’ve never worked with anyone on the project before. I don’t know the expectations, or anyone’s capabilities. Since I have only handed a few documents upstream, some feedback is expected. I will keep your suggestion in mind if things I send up always get feedback. IOW, it still is the first time or two. After almost two months. 
As I just posted, this project isn’t too bad for meetings, just enough to throw me off my game. I have been on projects where the the mantra was “the meetings will continue until productivity improves” - not good. If that were my situation here, I’d find another project.
I had a boss who was VP of Engineering and was promoted to company president. He told me once that the higher you go in management, you have to make more and more decisions based on fewer and fewer facts. That’s the why for all the meetings and reports. Most know that they aren’t getting the best information this way, but at least it is consistent information, so they can make consistent decisions.
My other take on being a manager is that it’s been said that a good manager will do a good job of managing without knowing how to do what those who are working for them are doing. IME, most of the managers I have known would benefit much by knowing how to do what those that are working for them are doing. Having spent the last 15 years of my career being a manager, I include myself in that group. You can never know too much about what those that are reporting to you do.
Think of yourself as a 2nd Lieutenant in Vietnam tasked with getting your platoon to the top of Hamburger Hill, once a day, for 5-7 days a week. Your job is to get to the top of the hill.
It doesn’t matter whether getting to the top of the hill is really important in the grand scheme of things.
It doesn’t matter whether your bosses know what the fuck they’re doing.
Just get to the top of the hill. A major component of that is maintaining the trust and respect of your team, but fundamentally you must get to the top of the hill. Because tomorrow, there will be another hill.
Management isn’t about believing in anything. Believing in things is for CEOs, board members, and individual contributors. Management is about getting things done, and not caring about it when you clock out.
Good luck with cognitive dissonance. The extra money helps.
Your job, and some people get offended by this idea, but hear me out…
Your job is to stop the flow of bullshit in both directions. You don’t want any bullshit from your team coming to the attention of managers and executives above you. You need to handle it all. You also need, on occasion, to mitigate the flow of bullshit downhill. From management ‘statements’ that undercut morale or are just fucking stupid, to complaints about your team, to ‘directives’ that can’t be accomplished, don’t make any goddamned sense or run counter to company policy and keeping your team functional.
Before you make waves, check the size of your canoe.
On a more serious note, if your boss is a good manager, then look to them for guidance and support. They will expect it, especially when you are new to your role.
If your boss is a bad manager, look for another boss to work for (seriously)
I don’t think the managers need to be able to reproduce the work of those below (and this is even more true the more steps there are in between), but my current client is one of those where management believes strongly in “more is better except when we’re talking about personnel”, while not understanding any of the stuff they manage. I don’t expect the COO to be able to fix a truck, but I do expect him to understand that fixing trucks takes more than five minutes and two dollars.
Here is an interesting article in Harvard Business Review on transitioning into management:
Some of the takeaways:
- More of your time will be spent developing relationships with management peers and superiors than micromanaging your team.
- Don’t micromanage
- Most stuff won’t get done because of your “formal authority”.
- Feeling like you have no control over what’s going on is normal.
- Leading a team is different from leading a collection of individuals individually.
- One manager described it as less of “being the boss” and more like being a “hostage held by various competing groups”.
It seems some of this stuff is new to you. Is it starting to go faster, as you get experienced? If so, there is hope.
Remember, whatever isn’t worth doing isn’t worth doing well. Does anyone look at your status reports? Can you keep a template and just change some small things every two weeks, saving time? If you learn what is really important to your managers, and what will be glanced at and then deleted, you can put your time where it counts.
For the stuff you review, can you find root causes of the problems? If you can, maybe you can increase the quality and reduce the stuff that gets kicked back to you. I know this takes time, but it is more important than getting a report that no one will read in on time.
Even a few meetings can disrupt the flow of your day. Are these meetings that you lead, or meetings which an ex officio member of and can ignore most of. If the latter, if your company’s culture lets you do email and stuff in a meeting, do it. If not, think through what you need to do which will make things go faster when you are released from the meeting.
Going to your manager may be a good idea depending on your manager. Some managers will be happy to offer you guidance, or even say they understand you are swamped. Some may find your issues a fatal weakness. Only you can determine this. (I’ve had both types.)
Good luck.