Some thoughts on managers who “don’t know what to do”

I am going to begin this by acknowledging all the EXCELLENT managers who either know what to do, or are prepared to listen to others when they don’t - managers who have, for instance, ended life threatening discrimination against me, gave me pay rises to undo gender discrimination, genuinely considered workload and did their work in a manner aimed to make my work achievable, etc. 

Those managers are the standard to aspire to. 

But others are not. 

Of the latter, I want to jot down some brief thoughts on managers who find themselves in the situation of not knowing what to do in a situation. 

This is something that can occur in other situations as well. When teaching people how to skipper in sailing, one of the light hearted examples I used to use was along the lines of “I see we have 200' waves today - that’s a bit unusual for this time of year. So here’s what we’ll do: we’ll start out using the normal heavy weather jobs for each person, and we'll work out how to adapt that.” 

That: 

• creates a boundary of usual/unusual to help reduce the overwhelm; 

• defines a starting point; 

• indicates that change may be necessary, and the skipper - by using “we” - is open to contributions ... although I would expect that to also be spelled out a bit more specifically in the detailed instructions following that intro. 

This also assumes everyone has been properly trained for normal conditions. 

In the business world, I have come across people with what is now termed a “performative” approach to managing. In my older terminology, they struck me as someone who had been told by an authority figure (possibly a uni lecturer or course instructor, but it could also go back to a parental figure) that “this is what you do”, followed by a description of the apparent, outer actions, and maybe cursed with something extolling the (evil) social status expectations one should have. 

Such pretend managers often first notice they have a problem when they don’t get the adulation/social status they expected - and may flounder as a result. For more on the evil known as social status, follow the link above. 

Going back to the problem of floundering, I can give an example from sailing. 

As a teenager, we used to go to a regatta up the coast a bit - it was a fortnight of camping, cruising sailing, and a couple of days of competitive sailing over a couple of days. 

One year I was given an award for most outstanding crew; the next year I was a new skipper, and my crew asked me how to win the award, so I described the outer actions I had done, and wound up with a very upset crew when he didn’t win the award that year. 

As an adult now, half a century later, I have an idea of how I would have handled that better (“it’s about showing your love of sailing, you have to show you have a greater love of sailing than the other crews, but don’t focus on outdoing others as much as on your love of sailing”, etc), but that doesn’t help my crew from back then. 

I do have a better example from almost as far back, which is when I was a newly fledged, very junior engineer who was sent out to a coal exploration project in inland (not quite the outback) Queensland. (The coal seams were too broken to be viable, so no mine was every built there, by the way - which I am very pleased about.) I was still several hours drive away from the head office, we had no mobile phones (faxes weren’t around, and the company didn't have telexes or even an electric typewriter [that excitement was still a few months off]), and initially if I wanted to make a phone call it was a 20 minute drive to nearest town and a public pay phone. 

The company who had engaged our services wanted a senior engineer, but the company didn’t have a senior engineer available, so they sent me and promised to give me all the support I needed - which was impossible.

So ... I chose to listen to the experts: the contractors who were doing the work (I was looking after provision of camps, “roads”, water supply, etc), the farmer whose property this was being done on and their staff, and a few other trusted people.

I felt comfortable assessing whether people could be trusted or not by face to face interactions and acting on my opinion, which was something different to my peers (who wanted written procedures on how to assess that), but I also pointed out to the contractors that the work and how they did it would be part of their legacy and affect references.

So ... I knew I was out of my depth and that the planned system wasn’t workable, so I adapted by choosing to listen to the experts. 

And I felt no qualms whatsoever at any impact that might have had on my perceived social/professional status. It was what was necessary to get the work done.

My only real regret was telling the assigned manager that the set up wasn’t working as bluntly as I did - which was driven partly by annoyance at being left in the lurch, but should still have been better delivered by me.

Going back to the topic of this post: 

I have considered throughout my life that managers should have some personal experience - or at least a working knowledge - of whatever and whoever they are managing. The main advantage of that is it avoids amathiac timelines or unwarranted and aggressive expectations of change being possible even if systems have been highly refined over a long period, but it also avoids situations like one nasty project manager I had to work under who first needed instruction on how water treatment worked (I regret doing that without objection, and doing so on the quiet - especially as later that project manager was known to be such an inflexible stickler that many contractors increased their prices to cater for the expected additional time [I have known such increases to be up to 10 - 20% for some bloody minded water authorities]). 

Management and project management are specific skills. 

Technical people cannot go into management roles (which was the de facto expectation back in the 80s) successfully unless they also have or acquire those skills.

Managers cannot take on management of technical projects/companies without a basic understanding of what is involved in what they’re managing - and those who think it is just managing timelines and budgets and yelling at people for not meeting a quite probably unrealistic deadline are tyrants, NOT managers.

Managers who lack that knowledge need to choose whether they are going to take a step up in their managing by listening and learning, or whether they are going to step down into a puffed up self important protection of their social status and doing performative floundering. 

And all managers who find themselves in new situations - such as those facing the introduction of faxes/telexes/personal computers/the Internet ... the climate crisis - also have to decide how they will handle not knowing.

 

PS - a response some of the floundering managers have tried using occasionally is that they “are challenging/allowing innovation”. 

Bull. 

IF that were true, budgets and timelines would allow for the development and refinement that is an essential part of anything new, not to mention the time to change systems etc. 

My experience is that many times that sort of response is simply an opportunistic lie to cover their incompetence.

 

 

Assumptions / basis 

In writing this, I have assumed / started from the following: 

• this blog states quite clearly that it is about political and human rights matters, including lived experience of problems, and thus I will assume readers are reasonable people who have noted the content warning in the post header;

Possible flaws 

Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:

• there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan  Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”; 
  
• I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
  

 

 

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