managing badly to manage better

I've been reflecting on the fact that my August post about bad management is still one of the most popular entries on this here little endeavour. And my very first post on the subject is also still getting hits. Funny how some topics are perennial favourites...

And so, in the spirit of giving people what they want, let's go drop another bucket in the very deep well of managerial ineptitude.

There was the senior manager who hovered by his door every day at about five to five, scoping anyone who dared to stop working and start chatting, let alone leave, before his or her full complement of hours was entered into the corporate ledger.

Naturally, he was also a hawk around 8:30. His judgement was, "If you come late, you're stealing from the company." Now, I think he actually said those exact words out loud in front of people. I may be wrong, I may have contorted my memory based on my feelings about him, but there's also a reason we thought it.

He got out of people exactly what he asked. A workforce that appeared at 8:30, and which vanished at 5:01. A workforce which stretched out work to fit whatever time was left in the day. A workforce which complained incessantly – about everything: lack of change, change, bosses, each other – but which enjoyed complaining, which literally had no other discourse about work.

A workplace which was essentially Dickensian in its philosophy, its attitudes and its outputs.

It's just so obvious that the more tightly you manage, the more the people working for you think, "What's the point?" and surrender mental responsibility to you. Okay, I do. The worst jobs I've had have been the ones with the least amount of responsibility; not necessarily the least interesting or manual, but which involved the least amount of trust.

On the flip side there was the creative director who actually assumed that I would learn and grow by doing the work. She would give direction and feedback, sometimes loosely, sometimes very loosely, but she always worked under the assumption that I would do the work – that I would think about, push it, try new things, and get to the place where the work needed to be.

The process was painful. Being intensely busy, she had limited time, meaning that you were always waiting for her, sometimes well into the evening. And I wrote and rewrote and rerewrote a lot. Sometimes I wished she'd just tell me what the answer was. Maddeningly, she never did, and I laboured for far more hours than I'd care to remember.

There were times when I absolutely fucking hated it.

But it was one of the best times of my life.

The assumption that I could do the work, that I could make it better, that I myself could be better, gave me a bedrock of confidence upon which I've built a career.

As a CD, I find myself pretty rarely giving people that much trust. I try, but inevitably there's a tight deadline or twitchy client, and I tend to become more prescriptive after a couple of rounds of feedback. Now, the folks who've worked for me are probably shaking their heads at this paragraph, or pounding their keyboards, or tweeting about what an ass I am, but I do grapple with this and I'm not always happy with my reactions.

Somewhere in my notes from a Northrop Frye class on the Bible and literature I remember jotting down this pearl of wisdom from the great man: to answer a question is to consolidate the mental level on which the question is asked.

Maybe I need to stop having answers.