{"id":7474,"date":"2015-05-04T14:27:55","date_gmt":"2015-05-04T19:27:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bobbeaty.com\/wp\/?p=7474"},"modified":"2015-05-04T14:48:30","modified_gmt":"2015-05-04T19:48:30","slug":"its-always-the-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bobbeaty.com\/wp\/archives\/7474","title":{"rendered":"It’s Always the People"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Management.jpg\"<\/p>\n

I took a walk with a friend today to get lunch. I had already eaten by they hadn't, and needed to get out of the office and vent a little. The problem they were having was a classic Little Red Hen<\/em><\/a> story: someone does a lot of work - in this case months<\/em> of work, and then when it starts to look interesting and executives are hyped about it, there's all kinds of folks wanting to take credit for the one person's work.<\/p>\n

I've run into this quite a bit in the last decade, and I've actually come to bargain<\/em> this with a manager. I let them take credit for the work, and they allow me to work in a way that I find most productive. In the end, they can take all the credit they want because there's no way anyone will really think they did it - they were the Manager<\/em> - not the Doer<\/em>, but they love the attention, and the sign on for more. Eventually, they are in a difficult position because they can't hope to have the same productivity from other people, and so the relationship becomes more symbiotic<\/em>. Which is good.<\/p>\n

But this is my friend's first experience with this, and I can remember being just as upset as they are, when it first happened to me. So on the walk to pick up a sandwich we talked about these problems, and what the real solution was. They were convinced<\/em> that it was the structure of an organization that breeds<\/em> this problem, but my assertion was that it's the people in it.<\/p>\n

It's always<\/em> the people.<\/p>\n

Their point was that there was no need for the traditional manager<\/em> in a successful organization. While I'm not saying that managers<\/em> are required<\/em><\/strong>, I accept that most people who run organizations feel more comfortable when there's a Chain of Responsibility<\/em> - if not a Chain of Command<\/em>, so that blame can be assigned when things go wrong.<\/p>\n

The only time I saw this not being used was in small start-up companies. There, it's assumed that everyone<\/em><\/strong> shares in the responsibility, and so there's no need or even interest<\/em> in assigning blame. But when an organization gets big enough, and that size depends on the group of people, then it's either time to stop growing, or start compartmentalizing the organization, and that leads to the silos<\/em> and the need to be able to attribute responsibility and it's evil alter ego - blame<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

It's hard to forego growth when times are good. It's something I've learned first-hand at the company I started. You want to do well, and you are happy when things are going well. People are happy, work is good, and you think \"Why not?\" But that's what leads to this problem because the question is the wrong one to ask. Better would be \"Why?\"<\/p>\n

It's not easy to do, I know. But if we had asked \"Why?\" more than \"Why not?\" - I might still be at that company I started. But I'm not, and it was a direct result<\/em> of the decisions we made. In the beginning we had to achieve consensus... after several years, it wasn't required<\/em>, and so we let it slide. That was a mistake. I wish he'd have asked \"Why?\"<\/p>\n

Anyway, I was glad to let a co-worker vent today, and I got a nice walk to The Mart out of it. That's a win-win to me. But it's always the people... no matter how bad the structure is, good people will make it work. But even the best structure will be dysfunctional when populated with bad people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I took a walk with a friend today to get lunch. I had already eaten by they hadn’t, and needed to get out of the office and vent a little. The problem they were having was a classic Little Red Hen story: someone does a lot of work – in this case months of work, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cube-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bobbeaty.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bobbeaty.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bobbeaty.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bobbeaty.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bobbeaty.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7474"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bobbeaty.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7475,"href":"https:\/\/bobbeaty.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7474\/revisions\/7475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bobbeaty.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bobbeaty.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bobbeaty.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}