I have somehow become the father confessor in my office. Co-workers amble into my office, slouch in one of my too-comfortable chairs, and confess. “Bless me father, for I have come to complain.”
From the operations superintendent: “Why doesn’t the plant manager like me? I’m working my butt off but all I hear from him are complaints about housekeeping.”
From the lead tech: “The contractors are lazy. Get rid of them. We’re better off hiring more people.”
From the lead operator: “The engineers don’t listen to me. They think they know everything.”
From the plant manager: “Why don’t the operators take initiative? They should have known better than to do what they did.”
Taken as a group, it seems like I work with a bunch of whiners. But we all whine. If you’ve read many of these posts you might come away with the thought that Manager X should really be Manager W, because all I ever do is snivel. Your saving grace is that you can make a click and read something that a writer wrote.
Sure, my co-workers vent every now and then. For some people it’s simply cathartic – they just want to let their emotions out on someone who is patient and sympathetic, and once the deed is done they can get back to functioning as part of the team. I just intersperse the occasional “uh huh,” and “I see…” until they quit talking (all the while I’m wondering how to calculate wins above replacement – that Nate Silver…). Then they leave and all is well.
For others, these sessions are their way of communicating to someone else through me. (Yes, I did figure that out on my own…) Take the operations superintendent… She has been a professional manager in another industry at a famous company whose name is likely inside the black box you are using to see this post. That company has a reputation for progressive HR, though of course they are still an org with people in it so it is far from perfect. However, they are much closer to perfect than the gulag, and our boss spent a few at the gulag with me (we were peers at the time – more on him in some later post). While I understand the boss well due to our common history, she often has no idea what he has pinging around inside his noggin. He is a nit-picker and a skeptic. She is an idealistic cynic. Those two styles do not mesh well. Therefore she has figured out that if she presents an idea he will treat it like a vulture does roadkill, whereas if I introduce something it will get traction. Sometimes.
This is a bit of a dangerous game, and to play it one needs to recognize the trust that each party has in the middleman. The middleman has to know that the two don’t really trust each other, or else he wouldn’t be in the middle. Trust is hard-earned and easily lost; as soon as the plant manager thinks I playing, or as soon as the ops supt thinks I’m mis-representing her ideas, the game is over and I lose. So why play? What do I get out of this?
One of the roles I see for myself as a middle manager is to bind the parts below me with the parts above me. It seems natural that upper management and lower management will be in conflict some of the time. Their high-level goals will be the same, but their daily goals will often be at odds. The ops supt wants the plant to run profitably, as does the plant manager (duh) but in order to be profitable the ops supt may see the need to shut down a line and send people home so we aren’t spending a fortune on OT. The plant manager just sees a line shut down and the resulting loss in productivity. (I might add here that we are a start-up, and dreadfully understaffed. We chose to keep labor costs down by minimizing operators, but we did no corresponding minimization of expectations, resulting in OT and burned out operators.) If you can tie these two conflicting ideas into one over-arching goal, you can get the two to agree. (This is somewhat like an evaporating cloud, which I sped by in an earlier post.)
It takes outstanding leadership to tie an org together, and though I have a small sample size to compare, I would say that outstanding leadership is extremely rare. I’ve never lived it. I promise that I’m not an outstanding leader. I recognize my faults, but I also recognize my strengths. One of my strengths is being able to listen to the comments and complaints I hear and translate them so that upper management can at least be aware of the grumblings below and make their own decisions about the state of the org. Where I can I make the call and do what’s required to make my org a better place to spend 8-10-12 hours per day. When I can’t I’ll push as far as I think I can get away with, and obviously sometimes a little farther.
Just as importantly, I can translate upper management into bite-sized chunks that can be understood by folks who don’t perceive how the game is played by people who don’t really work for a living. It’s the rare manager who can communicate to the operators of the world without talking down to them or purposefully talking above their heads. It’s up to me to translate the memo or email into the tactile nugget that an operator can grab and hold.
A tech sees nuts and bolts; upper management sees dollars. At the end of the day, the tech is worried about the dollars in his pocket; the manager is worried about the number of nuts and bolts that were used up.
I’m in the middle. I can play both sides. I must play both sides.
Comments
Post a Comment