{"id":41,"date":"2006-06-04T09:31:07","date_gmt":"2006-06-04T08:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/?p=41"},"modified":"2010-09-19T10:33:01","modified_gmt":"2010-09-19T16:33:01","slug":"the-seven-swear-words-of-effective-leaders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/the-seven-swear-words-of-effective-leaders\/","title":{"rendered":"The Seven Swear-words of Successful Managers"},"content":{"rendered":"

We had a bit of a sketch<\/em> at work, recently.\u00c2\u00a0 The developers had made some code changes to add new functionality that our users desperately wanted.\u00c2\u00a0 The change went in the night before a public holiday, which in retrospect wasn’t a great idea (especially as the programmer who made the change had flown back to Poland for the long weekend).\u00c2\u00a0 On the off chance that there might be problems, I went into work the next day anyway.<\/p>\n

When I got in (at 7:00 am), I found out that\u00c2\u00a0the implementation hadn’t gone in cleanly, and now none of our retail sites (worldwide) could enter orders into the system.\u00c2\u00a0 This was a bit of a problem, given our kanban<\/em> philosophy of maintaining minimal stock on site and ordering replenishment just in time (and just about every day).\u00c2\u00a0 Within minutes the\u00c2\u00a0problem was escalated all the way to Vice President level, and the few of us in the office were left scrabbling around trying to find the dialing code for Poland, and working out why on-call system support in America weren’t answering the ‘phone.\u00c2\u00a0 It took most of the day to find out the cause of the problem (the software that is supposed to propagate the changed code out to the servers basically didn’t, even though it said it did…), and it took people in Spain, Poland, Houston, England, and here in Brussels, to fix it.<\/p>\n

Typically, the next (working) day the blamestorming started.\u00c2\u00a0 Now, I’m in the Change Management team (actually, I’m pretty much the whole team), and we’d done everything by the book -\u00c2\u00a0going through the full\u00c2\u00a0change control process,\u00c2\u00a0advising the\u00c2\u00a0users a week before that the change was going in, and publishing documentation on the new functionality well in advance.\u00c2\u00a0My<\/em> only mistake was going into work on a public holiday, and then taking the initiative to handle communications with the users, keeping them and their management informed of the status throughout the issue, and advising them of the subsequent resolution.\u00c2\u00a0 In all of my communications I was careful to\u00c2\u00a0put as much of a positive spin on\u00c2\u00a0the situation\u00c2\u00a0as I could (or at least to down-play the impact), and took great\u00c2\u00a0care not to pin the blame on any one group or individual (especially our people here in Brussels), positioning the issue as unforeseeable and unavoidable.<\/p>\n

Despite this, I found myself being hauled over the coals for several hours by senior management, as\u00c2\u00a0each manager tried to prove it wasn’t their <\/em>group’s fault.\u00c2\u00a0The Support Manager (whose group had\u00c2\u00a0installed the change – and whose group, if anyone, should take responsibility) was positively apoplectic.\u00c2\u00a0 “What the f*** happened?\u00c2\u00a0 Weren’t you supposed to manage<\/em> this change<\/em>?”\u00c2\u00a0 (As though I was supposed to have predicted that\u00c2\u00a0the tried-and-tested system\u00c2\u00a0would fail this time!)\u00c2\u00a0 “So now my team is left looking like a bunch of f***ing monkeys!”\u00c2\u00a0 I explained what had happened (for about the fourth time that day), and tried to lighten the mood a bit by saying “Yeah, it’s a bit unfortunate as I know the users are going to love this new functionality”.\u00c2\u00a0 Bad move.\u00c2\u00a0 “Well thank you very<\/span> f***ing much for that!\u00c2\u00a0 But it doesn’t f***ing work does it?”.\u00c2\u00a0 Before I had the chance to point out that yes, it did actually work now, he’d stomped back to his office, slamming the door behind him so hard the walls shook.\u00c2\u00a0 He was immediately on the ‘phone to his<\/span> manager, and through the walls I could clearly hear the phrase “stupid bastards” and the f-word liberally peppering his conversation.<\/p>\n

Now, I may not be a manager (God forbid that<\/em> ever happens – remember the Peter Principle), but I do know a bit about leadership.\u00c2\u00a0 And I’m pretty sure that swearing at the staff and belittling them in an open-plan office (especially when they were only trying to cover your<\/span> ass in the first place) won’t exactly make them respect you.\u00c2\u00a0 Or make them want to do anything for you ever again.<\/p>\n

We’ve got another public holiday coming up soon, but this time I’m going to be at home, sat on the sofa, with my ‘phone switched off.\u00c2\u00a0 Let’s see the ungrateful bastard manage that<\/span> change…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We had a bit of a sketch at work, recently.\u00c2\u00a0 The developers had made some code changes to add new functionality that our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,13],"tags":[40],"class_list":["post-41","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-work","tag-management"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":266,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions\/266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}