March 19, 2021
Dear Everyone:
How the hell did I
get to be 70 years old? Yes,
yes, I know. Breathe in.
Breathe out. Just
keep doing that for years and years.
To be honest, I can’t believe I’ve been doing it this long.
Remember when you
were a kid and some grownup told you, “You’ll understand when you’re
older”? That was vexing.
Only now, I realize that many times, it’s true.
Take bosses, for
instance…
Looking back now, from the position of
“comfortably retired”, I can realize that I had good Supervisors and I
had bad Supervisors. At the
time, all I could see was just how bad or good they seemed to be.
I now realize, with 20/20 hindsight, that pretty much all the
“bad” ones were first-time Supervisors.
The good (or better) ones were the ones who had some experience
to work with.
(Experience:
That which you get immediately after you desperately needed it.)
It has long been the policy of companies like
the one in which I was employed to promote people “up through the
ranks”. If you were good at
something, they put you in charge of other people doing the same thing.
There is a basic flaw in this policy:
Being good at something doesn’t automatically make you good at
directing other people doing it.
Just because you know how to run a variety of copying machines
doesn’t mean you can run a copy center with a dozen people working in
it.
Looking at it another way:
When you’re good at running a copy machine, or a bunch of copy
machines, you typically spend 80% of your time working with things and
20% of your time dealing with people, usually people above you or beside
you. Suddenly they promote
you to Supervisor; and you’re now spending 80% of your time dealing with
people, most of whom report to you; and 20% of your time working with
the things that you were so good at working with before.
If you, and the people under you, are lucky,
you have a manager who can guide you before you really put your foot in
it and get canned for your efforts.
Surreptitiously kicking the copy machine may help you get over a
brief period of chagrin; kicking an employee is never a good idea, no
matter how much you feel they deserve it.
The first Supervisor I had, in a full-time job,
was a guy named “Dick” (no kidding).
He was a geologist.
But he couldn’t get along with the other geologists in the department.
So the Powers That Be made him a Supervisor and put him in charge
of the support staff. The
guy had a doctorate in geology and couldn’t get along with other
doctorates. So what made
them think it was a good idea to set him up to lord over a bunch of mail
and file clerks?
Years later, a former co-worker was reminiscing
about the days of “Dick”, the Supervisor.
She told me that many people got together after work at a
neighborhood bar to discuss how much they hated “Dick”.
They had backyard get-togethers with all their families on
weekends. And they spent
much of their time talking about what a terrible boss “Dick” was.
Then came the day that “Dick” was “let go”
during a department restructure.
When I heard that the axe had fallen on “Dick”, I blurted out:
“Oh! There is
a God!”
After a few months, all those people finally
realized that the only thing they had in common was their joint hatred
of “Dick”. Without him, they
had nothing left to talk about; and their group quickly drifted apart.
Many years later, I moved to a department that
had hired “Alma”, a woman who knew a great deal about Records
Management. Again, with
20/20 hindsight, I now realize that she should never have been put in
charge of anyone. She didn’t
have the first clue how to manage people.
And she was much too self-centered to even realize that there was
something she could learn.
Less than five years later, she was shown the
door and I danced on top of my desk, singing, “Ding-Dong! the Witch is
Dead”. In fact, a Manager
who once had our workgroup under his authority told me years later that
the crowning achievement of his career was getting rid of “Alma”.
(For the record, he was not a part of the group who decided to
hire her in the first place.)
There are, of course, people who excel at being
Supervisors and all blessings be upon them.
More importantly, some people realize that they are not suited to
the job. Our own brother,
Matt, was once promoted into a supervisory role.
He told me it took him only about two weeks to realize that it
was not the job for him; and he told his manager as much.
Good for him.
Love, as always,
Pete
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