Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Well meaning managers often start new activities. The activities are not sustainable, and the well meaning manager gains a reputation as a liar.

I am a grandparent. I have one grandson who is now 23 months old (I have to put up a new photo of him sometime :-).

Grandparents engage in a lot of unsustainable activities with their grandchildren. Here are two examples.

(1) There is a pond near my house. When my grandson visits, I take him to the pond. I gather pebbles and and tosses them into the water. He loves to toss things and it is exciting to see the splashes as the pebbles hit the water. This is great fun; he laughs, and I laugh at his joy. This is not sustainable. You can’t stop and throw pebbles into every body of water you see. Just go into one of those restaurants that have huge fish display tanks. My grandson thinks he should be able to toss pebbles into the fish tanks. The other adults think otherwise.

(2) We have a bunch of old Disney cartoon movies on VHS tape. My grandson loves to listen to the songs. His favorite are the marching and singing elephants from the animated “Jungle Book” movie. When he asks, I play the tape for him. We laugh and sing and it is great fun. Needless to say, it is not a sustainable activity as you can’t always play a cartoon video tape on demand.

And what does fun with the grandson have to do with anything professional? I don’t know how many times I have seen well meaning managers start activities that were not sustainable. “From now on,” starts the well meaning manager, “we will have bagels on Monday mornings to eat during our staff meeting.” Within weeks the bagels disappear from the meetings. Within months the meetings themselves disappear. Neither was sustainable. I could go on with a few dozen more painful examples.

The result of promising to sustain unsustainable activities is that the well meaning manager comes to be seen as a blow hard. That is a polite way of saying you cannot trust anything the well meaning manager says. That is a polite way of say that the well meaning manager is a liar. Oh well, not a good result.

Please take care when starting something. At least preface the new activity with a kind of disclaimer like:

We will have Monday morning staff meetings. We will have bagels at the staff meetings. We will continue these until we stop them as often the benefit of such activities disappears.

I don’t state such a disclaimer to my my grandson. There is something about the grandfather-grandson relationship that eliminates the need for such a disclaimer. Somehow I have acquired an extraordinary status with my grandson. He was born with an extraordinary status in my eyes. The manager-employee relationship, however, does not enjoy such extraordinary status.