Hey, I learned; it’s why I changed into a drinking buddy!
Believe me, the senior managers wonder why their employees are such lazy idiots, and they aren’t any less correct.
I get to work with people in all levels of organizations. In my honest experience, the senior managers are smarter than their employees, on average. It’s not true of absolutely everyone, but, generally speaking, the folks on top are legitimately smarter.
Mine is, “huh, is the work finished?” And I’m not joking, I have the electrician in right now.
But then, I’ve worked from home and one of the benefits to my employer on several of those occasions was that I was able to pull more work than if I’d been at the office. I was doing data cleansing, which does not require you to talk with anybody, or to stare at the computer while the databases chug through a step: if I’d had a lawn I would have been able to mow it and work at the same time! During the biggest bout of data cleansing at home I did several loads of laundry, cooked and froze as many meals as could fit in my fridge’s freezer, did the ironing and cleaned the studio floor-to-ceiling - and I did in 3 days what would have taken about 4 weeks if I’d been doing it at the office.
Mind you, I was blessed with immediate managers who Wanted Things Done, a CEO who Wanted Things Done and would smack down high-level managers who got in the way of their minions’ work, and high-level managers who didn’t like being smacked.
Man, I resemble that remark. I still cringe when I have to ask my assistant to do something I should be perfectly capable of doing myself - but my assistant - worth her weight in gold, bless her heart - now routinely yells at me when she sees me booking a meeting. She knows she’s about 100x more organized than I am, and if I start booking my own meetings I’m probably going to end up with a scheduling problem at some point 
I’ve had the same assistant at 3 companies now. The work efficiency multiplier that is in effect with a good assistant is a severly under-researched topic just waiting for some industrious grad student…
They’re often smarter, but not wiser. But usually it’s middle management that’s the screwup. They’re typically ignorant of both the strategic AND the tactical. They’re valued because they get the stinky organizational jobs.
I also find that upper management doesn’t hold the reins tightly when they have a sales force. They’ll let accounting dictate business decisions. Or they’ll let sales run roughshod over operations and intervene on behalf of customers.
But I’ve found that if you get top management informed and involved in the nuts and bolts of the company, they’ll make the right decisions. It’s the layers and politics that intervene that cause the screwups. There are exceptions of course.
You make an interesting observation. The good, competent, productive assistant not only makes the manager more productive but also acts as an ambassador to the clients. The efficiency impact helps within the company and is noticed outside the company.
Just as an example, there is someone with whom I have a business relationship. He recently changed companies. He took his assistant with him. That had a huge impact on my decision to move my business with him. While the guy I’m talking about is good, I trust the assistant to do everything properly with no screw-ups. I don’t always have to talk to the main guy because I know that information will get acted on and passed on accurately. Therefore, I know that things are covered at all times whether someone is on vacation or whatever. I have been in similar situations where I didn’t trust the assistant and it cost the company my business. It delayed things because I felt I had to talk to or follow up with the main guy to make sure things got done properly. Situations like that are often overlooked in the evaluation of productivity.
I’m currently in a pilot work from home program and I’m slacking off less at home than I did from work. I’m getting 3 hours a day of commuting time back so I think it’s perfectly fair for me to give more focus to my work during business hours.
Since it’s a pilot (abeit phase 2) I am extremely motivated to make sure it’s viewed positively.
Luckily my manager is awesome and encouraged our entire group to participate. We now have 12 of us on the program and 2 in the office and it’s working out well. We are on a 4 from home/1 in the office schedule and the one day is flexible to allow for us to attend meetings where an in person presence is easier.
For us it’s not a major change since the teams we work with are spread out across multiple buildings already so we already do the majority of our work on conference calls.
The company also put in several tools to support “casual conversation”, we use the corporate version of MSN Messenger and corporate culture creates the expectation that users are available on it for the majority of the day.
My beef is senior managers who are hired from another organization or industry who don’t really have an understanding of how the company does what it does. They don’t know how to evaluate what they don’t understand, so they come up with all sorts of projects, usually involving slogans or cute acronyms, about things like “figuring out what our core purpose should be”, that they want the lower managers and rank-and-file to execute. They want feedback from said acronym-laden tasks so as to have something they can relate to and review.
In the meantime, the rank-and-file are screaming, “We KNOW what our core purpose is! We are a laboratory! We analyze samples and send the results to the clients! That is what we do! Help us to find the resources to do it, help us to be more efficient, but if you do not understand what we are supposed to be doing, you are not qualified to manage the company!”
No, this is not an exaggeration. This is what our division director presented to us at a recent “leadership” meeting. His idea of what our priorities should be involved projects and slogans directed toward figuring out who we are and what we want to be, with the company’s actual work of sample analysis at the bottom of the list of priorities. Most of the attendees came away disgusted with his idea of “leadership”. That is what you get when you hire an HR guy to run a science organization. Who the hell thought THAT was a good idea?
Thank you, I feel better now.
That’s where you wish HIS boss would say “Excuse me, but you’re the only one who doesn’t know what the hell we do. Figure it out and stop wasting our time.”
Oh, don’t I! There are already bets on how long he’ll last.
Someone above mentioned if the managers know the nuts and bolts of the company, they’ll make the right decisions, but the politics screws it up. This is a classic example of that. Guy was hired for political reasons, not his managerial experience. But the winds of politics change.
I feel your pain. I’ve seen far too much of this shit.
Just for fun, let me take a swing at this. I don’t know anything about your company or your business. I’m assuming that what you’ve laid out is basically accurate.
So, I’m the new division director that is clueless. I’ve got to rally the troops and improve the business. Here’s what I do:
-
Try to understand how the inner processes work.
-
Try to find out what we are doing well and what could be improved.
-
Determine who is competent and who is a drag on productivity.
-
Find out what the competition is doing and how we can do it better.
-
Focus on five things; keeping our customers, finding new customers, insuring accuracy in our testing, speeding up the delivery of our result (if possible), performing our job on a more cost effective basis.
-
Then I work on improving efficiency in all areas of the business. The first thing is, I don’t waste time and money on expensive BS meetings to make people think I am some kind of wizard. How much do you think your session cost the company? How many hours were wasted? These things aren’t cheap. (I was once in a company that announced a wage freeze, then to build morale, they took everyone on a nighttime river cruise. Assholes!)
Now tell me how I’m doing. I’m not making a dime off this. Do I get the job even though I don’t want it?
Bob Nardelli (@ Chrysler) was the embodiment of this. The man didn’t know a thing about the automotive industry, didn’t know a thing about cars, didn’t seem to care to bother to actually learn anything about them, and, well, the result spoke for itself. He’d send out internal e-mails to everybody and they would be just dripping with the worst business babble around. “Leveraging synergies” and all that. But he always signed them as “Bob,” so you know he was just plain folks. So he trashes Home Depot, drives Chrysler off a cliff, and goes on to take the NewPage Paper Corp. into bankruptcy.
And yet this dimp will probably land another high-paid gig.
You’re hired! 
Based on my life’s history, this is where I’d trash another gig by, when I just happened to get on the elevator at the same time with him, asking why he’s the only one who doesn’t know what we do and why he’s embarassing himself by making a big show of it.
Thank you. The sad thing is that I came up with this in about 10 minutes, off the top of my head, on a Saturday night when I’ve had a few glasses of wine. Yet, some nincompoop is actually getting paid to foist unproductive crap on a company where the focus should be pretty obvious.
Really, if I can think this thing out with your approval in this circumstance, what does that say about the person that is being paid for their “leadership”?
I once worked for a company that had a management policy based on the last management book that last hit the bestseller’s list. It was literally the management theory flavor of the month. It became schizophrenic. Nobody knew how they were suppose to manage. Whatever management book the CEO last read became the company policy. Of course, it was a disaster. I bailed well before the bankruptcy.
Toxgoddess, take my post, elaborate on it, do whatever with it, and get yourself a promotion. You can’t do any worse than the idiots they are asking you to follow.
Again, I feel your pain.
Senior Management are idiots because the higher you are, the farther you have to climb should you fall. They then do everything they can to deflect blame, scapegoat, and make sure they are not responsible for anything while taking the credit for everything. Fuck this shitty place :mad::mad::mad:
There is the old saying, “You meet the same people on the way down that you met on the way up.”
I want to tell you that is so true. I heard it and learned from it. I’ve seen it more than a few times. Taking it to heart saved me a lot of pain. I saw others suffer because they had no idea. I ran into the CEO that was the management book “flavor of the month” a few years later after I worked for him. I talked to him in a retail store. His trophy wife had divorced him and he was looking for a job. Not that he needed it for the money but he needed something for his self-esteem. I actually came away a bit sad. He was basically a good guy but he did get in over his head and made up for it by adopting a lot of BS that others fed him rather than analyzing what was needed in his own business. That was his downfall. I don’t know what happened to him but at the meeting I got the feeling that he was happy to connect with me and, on a very subtle level, I was now his superior. It was weird. He needed me more than I needed him. Not that he “needed” me but that maybe I could help him while he was in no position to help me.
This is currently endemic to the educational field. Everybody, EVERYBODY, thinks that the educational system (whether it’s K-12 or higher ed) would “benefit from an outside perspective” or “find value in a fresh perspective.” The result is we get oil company CEOs running colleges.
Most industries would laugh with hysteria at the CEO of a corporation being someone with absolutely no experience in the field whatsoever. But in the educational field, we’re expected to embrace it.
Knowing a field is not necessarily the same thing as being able to impart that knowledge effectively. I know how to read. I don’t know how to teach reading. I know how to do math, up to HS algebra and geometry. I haven’t got a clue as to how to teach someone else to solve for X. And, as pointed out in another thread, you can’t teach kids who aren’t ready to learn.
I hear people proposing that we hire people without teacher’s degrees, or without any educational training at all. This scares me.
Lots of top quality private schools do that all the time- I had a particularly good science teacher who was fresh out of college. Admittedly, that sort of discretion might not interact well with a public sector with a unionized workforce.