Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Managers are everywhere. The vast majority of them perform their jobs poorly. Still, we work for these bad managers. Why?

I am reading a manuscript written by Johanna Rothman on managing project portfolios. I expect this to be a fine book when published. It is for people who have more work than they can accomplish with their resources (sounds like a big audience). Johanna describes methods for organizing the work so that you put your resources on the most important tasks and let the others go (say “NO”).

Good managers do the types of things that Johanna describes. Good managers think ahead, consider things bigger than their own pet project, and do something to make everyone’s life better.

I haven’t worked for many good managers. I would call only one in ten of the managers I worked for to be “good managers.” I suppose that leaves the rest to be bad managers or maybe mediocre managers.

Then again, I worked 28 years in government. “The government” is supposed to be managed poorly, and we hold to those expectations. There are many reasons why the government is dominated by bad managers, but that still begs the question:

Why work for bad managers?

I once worked around a group of men who were assigned to a different office – the Office of Communications or “Commo” as they liked to call themselves. These men often spoke of how Commo was managed poorly. They actually took great pride in that Commo probably had the worst managers in the government. They saw it as a challenge to be able to accomplish anything of value given they were managed so badly. As one of them told me, “anyone can accomplish something with good managers. It takes a special breed to do something with bad managers.”

One prime example of bad management in government and in Commo in particular is the idea of “multitasking.” It still echoes in my ears, “If you can only do one thing at a time, you shouldn’t be working here.”

This came from a Commo veteran while we were trying to fix a broken system. He wanted to run tests with three or four variables in each test. I was trying to convince him that such tests wouldn’t tell us anything. We needed to keep to one variable at a time. I wasn’t able to convince him, and our testing took 12 hours to complete instead of one.

I have lost track of the books, articles, and studies I have read that show that multitasking is a bad practice. People spend more energy shifting from task to task than they do working any one task. There are actually mathematical models to prove the folly of shifting among more than two or three tasks. Still, bad managers won’t listen. They cling to the fantasy that all their employees should be able to add one more task to their workload at any given time (at the whim of the manager).

So still,

Why work for bad managers?

I suppose there are as many answers as there are people. Some answers are:

• I need the money
• This was the only job available
• All managers are stupid
• You think this guy is bad, you should have seen…
• There are good managers? Where?

I think the biggest reason is that most people have never worked for a good manager. We simply don’t know what we are missing.