They Don't Know What You Do 3

Texas Slim writes his Notes from the Cube to Hank & Kyra . . .

Most scary (and let's be honest, it's no one's fault) is the fact that sometimes things are changing so fast that if you are not the one doing the job you can't know what it is anymore.

It doesn't matter the level: I used to work in Accounts Receivable, a Past Due deacon of detection. But the way they electronically work through those things now, there are analytical tools that would have made me redundant and leave me in the knowledge lurch right now for sure.

Move that up a notch: imagine I'm a Manager who doesn't believe in micro-management (a blessing) and has been out of the trenches a few years: how does he deal with his underlings when he knows that he doesn't know what the underlings actually do? It's a toughie.

The Cube responds . . .

I was going to stay out of this awhile, but I've got to correct Slim here: if the you have a manager who knows that he doesn't know about something, that's only a problem when he takes a defensive/aggressive attitude. If he's halfway intelligent and, being a non-micro-manager like you described, I'm assuming he is, he'll be smart enough to respect the situation. If he's not halfway intelligent - or insecure in some other way (and, really, how many of us are secure in our jobs these days?) - then you've got someone looking to blame things on: and it's always easiest to blame it on something no one understands.

But we're not even talking about "halfway intelligent" here: Hank and Kyra were talking about management not knowing that they don't know what you do. Or how you do it. They know results - usually results they want to see, not necessarily objectively - and they don't particularly care how those results were achieved.

Or maybe they care, but they still don't really know how it's done.

Or maybe they think they know how it's done, but they are off the mark. It's like with Sports, Movies and Politics: EVERYONE is an "expert" and absolutely certain that they know how it "should be." Yeah.

They don't really know what you do.