Nugget 6: Personal priorities often cause managers to “Resource bomb” each other, there is nothing actually aggressive or deliberately malicious in this.

Explanation:

It often seems as if some managers are attempting to hog all the resource in a project, and you often see what I call “Resource bombing”, which is when one manager uses their position or the fact that their project is flavour of the month, to rob another project of resource to try and get their deliverables over the line.

For the most part there is nothing deliberate or malicious in this, they are not trying to hurt the other project they are just trying to deliver and feel they don’t have the resources to meet management expectations.

Often confronting them directly and explaining the harm that they are doing to your project will get them to either back off or enable you to manage it between the two of you, then you can both deliver with the limited resources you have. At worst formally talking to them about it shows you are trying to work as a team player,  and give a paper trail that allows you to justify part of your non delivery because you have had resources taken off you, 

This is a situation where you need to solidly try and fix it not just for your own delivery, but for your team so they are not painted as people that can’t deliver.

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.

Nugget 5: Sometimes doing nothing is the fastest and most efficient way of solving a problem

Explanation:

Now I know that sounds like a stupid and very Zen thing to say but bear with me.

There is a movie theory that says that in Raiders of the lost ark,  Indiana Jones had absolutely no effect on the movie at the end, The Nazis would have still got the Ark and still died when they opened it, This same theory can be applied to a lot of management work.

let’s take a theoretical problem, Something has gone Bang, There are 5 people who would normally be your go-to people to fix it, An email is sent to them but only two respond, The other three are currently busy and not reading emails, The management all get over excited because their email has not been immediately acted upon, They send chase emails, They have individual meetings with each other, They call multiple meetings with all of the 5 people who can fix the problem and by the time they reach all of these 5 people and get them all into concert, they finally get a solution.

Now step back from this, Let’s say that the management had done nothing after they sent the original email, The five important people are already busy, chasing after them doesn’t actually get them any quicker, When they finish their current work they go and have a look at the email, One of them has a solution to it, Provides the solution and then the problem is solved. This normally happens in just about the same time frame as the management running around and doing all the meetings, They haven’t actually made the problem go away any quicker, All they’ve done is waste their time and the time of the few technical people they could get hold of.

So the moral of the story is don’t do knee jerk reactions when your immediate needs are not pandered to, particularly if it’s something that is not immediately costing the company money or can wait a few hours, better to have control than a panic attack.

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.

Nugget 4: Late night management emails are not an attack.

Explanation:

For once this one is not aimed at managers, it is aimed at the Techs and Frontline associates, I used to hate receiving management emails late at night or at the end of a Friday or the weekend or something like that. It put me under stress, it was uncomfortable and I thought they were watching me and wanting me to work the hours they were, But it turns out this is not always the case, If you’re stuck in bloody meetings all day or constantly on chat being chased for deliverables email takes a second place, and the only time you can sit down and deal with it (Other than the Odd Crisis Email) is when  everybody else has stopped working and therefore stopped chasing you, The reason that management do emails late at night and at the weekends is because that’s the only time they can try and clear their inbox, it’s not a personal thing, they just know that they won’t have a chance to send it during the week.

Weird.

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.

Nugget 3: Office working is far more productive than remote working when dealing with human interaction, but its a mistake to assume it can be maintained at that level forever.

Explanation:

Even before the pandemic, there was a debate over office working vs. remote working and the thing is that both of them are productive in their own way, but after 5+ years of hard remote working and learning to deal with it on a large team scale I think I’ve reached an epiphany.

Day to day working is more efficient from home, you can actually get on with working, you  are actually more productive in completing tasks (providing you actually spend the hours working that you would in an office) as there are far less distractions, Plus there is the absence of Lost time from travelling, but that doesn’t mean that home working is always more productive. For example workshops or large meetings particularly those that involve forms of conflict are far far more productive in person, as sales people have known forever.

But one thing that seems to have been forgotten, particularly by older generations of senior managers is that this kind of productivity cannot be sustained day after day after day, so in my opinion the new hybrid working model is the best, I personally go in for one day a week on a Monday to kickstart me into the work mentality.

But also I have seen the one week workshop where everyone comes together to solve a major goal, get tons done and deliver massively finish with a senior manager saying that we should work like this all the time and this is why being in an office is better,

NO! it’s not, everybody is mentally shattered, such work should be consider a sprint, and while its attractive to think such a pace can be kept up, it cant and should be used now as a usefully times tool to resolve issues or reconnect humans with each other

Sorry if this nugget got turned into more of a rant but it’s something I feel quite strongly about at the moment.

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.

Nugget 2: If everything is urgent then nothing is urgent

Explanation:

I don’t know why I’m even explaining this, it even appears in Disney movies for heavens sake but still it seems to be needed to be said, 

You cannot have everything be high priority. It’s just stops things from being delivered, For every given set of tasks you have a limited set of resource, grow up and assign a set of priorities, Yes we know that you’re getting pressure from above, but the point of being a manager involves managing priorities, Don’t chop and change them, manage expectation, Don’t over promise and you will get better deliverables! (I sure as hell am guilty of this and often have to have a stern word with my self for rolling over and just wanting to please)

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.