By nature I am scruffy, very, very scruffy. To quote Terry Pratchett “He just seemed to generate an internal scruffiness field. The man could rumple a helmet.”
But when it comes to work, I find that I have actually started to dress up more and more, full ironed shirt and tie, even when I have no calls. Not for the traditional reasons such as: Your work outfit is a uniform or to give you authority or things like that.
No!, I have found that it’s actually mentally good for you. It acts as a demarcation between work and your social life, particularly as working remotely is basically here to stay. Putting on a shirt to work means I find that I can turn my brain off when I stop working. Also I talked to a friend who works in the service industry and when you put on your badge and your company t-shirt you’ve put on armour, what people say just for effect no longer hurts, because its no longer a personal attack, its now about the corporation you represent. I’m finding a similar thing is happening with a shirt and tie at the project level 1.
The more formal I get, the better the armour, the better the amour the more hits I can take to win the battle.
Particularly with permy work, if I’m still working as a contractor its not the same[↩]
Before we all became managers or started doing managerial things, we used to have a speciality, or as some might say “A real job” 1. We were technical or business focussed or operational but we had something, and when a lot of us turned to managers we forgot that, we left it behind. We didn’t need it. We are big and powerful people…
I personally don’t subscribe to that as a good plan. I take my lead on this from the fact that one of the directors I respect the most, still retains an extremely high level of competency in their business speciality, not merely in the business of being a director. In feudal times, people who used to wait on lords i.e. flunkies, Used to have to be double skilled, so that if they ever lost their jobs, they did not turn to either beggary or crime. I feel that this applies to modern managers.
You should keep up with whatever original skill(s) you had, you should maintain them, keep them sharp and up to date, Even if you don’t think you’re going to use them. Take it from me. If you are a manager, the amount of respect you receive from people that you are responsible for is far, far higher If they know you cannot be baffled with bullshit. If you know your stuff. it introduces a different level of respect at work.
I personally maintain 2 CV’s 2 and use them to judge if I am still worth the money that clients and employers would pay, I have never regretted the extra effort, as it validates my usefulness.
Well most of us did, some people went into management as a defined career and they are beyond help[↩]
I always find it fun when you bump into a modern corporate action that matches perfectly a mediaeval, or even older behaviour, and is just merely a rebranded version.
This weeks one is “Coin Hordes”, which were the conscious hiding of deposits of money (often in pots).
It was most frequently connected with the state of the monetary economy at a given time and was often done “In uncertain times of war, when plundering expeditions threatened”
Now, you often find the corporate version of this, which is assigning budget into different areas that are not normally visible, i.e. moving support money into project, project money into capital expenditure etc etc. Its done for exactly the same reasons.
I have yet in my career seen this done for a dishonest reason, and only seen it triggered by senior managers, who due to poor communication at upper levels, have made their own managers respond with “I do not know what the powerful people are doing, but I know I still have basic deliverables to meet, so will do what I can to defend myself and those I have a responsibility for”.
If you’re a very senior manager and you are seeing this in your teams, it’s because your managerial style is such that you trigger a response of uncertainty such as war or plundering. perhaps improve communication so that people have faith in your goals.
An issue that shows the difference in how people view things and is very, very common, particularly when you merge financial industries is how people view dirty data.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here. Dirty data is not the same as Human centric data. Human centric data is when you have something that is meant to works with people and you try and force it into situations where people Only look at data in the way it works with systems.
The best contrast is when you compare banking transactions and insurance transactions. Yes, yes, I know. It’s very boring.., BUT banking transactions are very, very pure. They’re very strict money orientated things that are run by accountants and can be nailed hard to the wall. Such data structures are very precise and clean. So when there’s bits missing, they are provably dirty.
But if you take someone from a strictly banking financial place and put them in insurance, they often think insurance data is hideously dirty. It isn’t. It’s human data. Think of this scenario:
You have someone who is working out an imprecise insurance policy. How do you get imprecise insurance you ask? because it’s rooted in fear. Insurance is how when frightened of something that you need protection from, you talk with a human on how to protect yourself from said fear. Obviously with common fears like a car theft we have an automated way of dealing with it. But in a lot of cases, it is a discussion and negotiation over things that people value, and for that, you tend to involve a human, hence why you still have a lot of human brokers. Such negotiations are often done away from computers, away from the little screens. And when they are done, someone signs a bit of paper, the broker who has worked out the price, then takes everything back and only then tries to work out how he’s going to get everything that he agreed and signed up for into the computer. Now the computer has very definite things in a financial transaction that it REALLY wants, Many of them multiple thought sets away from a negotiation (Audit and regulation stuff for example). So the broker or whoever is doing the data input tries to work out the best way of getting the data in. Often in retrospect, they’ve missed getting stuff, but they’ve already agreed, got the signature and taken the money, they’re not going to be able to go back (not without loosing face). They do their best, they fill enter the data, but very often to them its merely the paperwork, the real work has been done, this is just naff stuff.
Unfortunately when this is then taken further up the line, analytics are done and there’s fields that don’t make a lot of sense because they’re out of context. And that data is classed as dirty. In this situation, it’s not from the original context, it’s human data that is too broad and too changeable to fit in the neat boxes.
So before you actually take data and say this is rubbish and just shout that people should take more care, try and think of the context in which the data is being provided. Because ultimately, to try and make data ‘non dirty’. You’re gonna have to go back to how the data was put in and change those methods, if you don’t it will result in never ending data clean-ups 1, you’re not going to get buy in from the people that do it. You’re not going to make people happy. And ultimately they will just complain and as soon as you’re gone they’ll go back to their old ways because you’re not taken consideration of what they do and how they do it.
So not all dirty data is dirty. Some of it just involves humans.
or in the worse cases, data lakes that try and fix it in an automated way going forward[↩]
Normally just shortened to “Flower Sink” this is something that sounds like it should be easy but in reality its something that causes utter hell to implement, sometimes used in a slightly derogatory way if you call a stakeholder (any gender) “Mrs Blanding” to mean someone who does not understand the consequences of their actions or demands.
Explanation:
This is best explained by merely watching the YouTube video attached. But I’ll paraphrase it here. Basically, an old black and white movie from 1950 called “Mr. Blanding’s builds his dream house” has this one scene where there’s this huge bill that’s just come in, and they try and track down where its come from for this custom house. It turns out that it’s from a tiny and seemingly innocuous request made by Mrs. Blanding, the architect explains the whole detail of why it’s caused such an expense and the background for such a huge knock on effect from a really simple and what should have been an easy request. It is the best and original example of when someone comes up to you and asks for something that “will just take a minute” and then they do not accept that to just make their little request will cause lots of things to need to be done and have huge knock on effects. It is also one of the few examples where you can take someone who is simply not getting that such things have a huge impact and showing them the video, because it’s so old and so venerable it rarely causes offence, so it’s more useful than just about any of these corporate terms that you’ll read here.
Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.
