Overheard young lady @food court bitching abt boss. Never say wat to do, jus plz process dis, pls action on this. Wanted to say "that's working life, dear."
Ok. I fail at this attempt. By the time I trim the above sentence to 140 characters, I completely lose the core insight. The gist is that the girl was frustrated by her boss' infuriating habit of not telling her exactly what was required out of her.
Immediately, what ran through my mind was the phrase David Allen likes to push in his GTD books. Paraphrased: "We live in a world of increasingly ill-defined 'work' and this ambiguity gives us significant amounts of stress. We have to learn how to put into place systems that help us deal with and process these amorphous chunks into 'doable' tasks to allow our minds to relax."
Even before I ended up head first in a managerial role, I've been in that girl's shoes, frustrated to the gills with my seemingly-incompetent supervisor, who could never articulate WHAT the HELL she wanted.
(It didn't help that she was an incompetent evaluator of quality either, so I tended to just follow the chain of command long enough to accord her a minimal amount of respect, then place the decision in the hands of higher authority, aka her boss. But that's besides the point.)
My present supervisor is now the same person who was her boss. There's still a significant amount of ambiguity in the work I'm supposed to be doing. Somewhat different in that I now have more authority to assign myself and define the work I need to do, instead of waiting for someone to assign it, but JUST as ill-defined before that.
I've come to realize that's how work is. (Or in life or a sandbox MMO.)
You learn how to deal with it. Stuff you can define and decide, you somehow grapple your way to defining it, or use a clearly-articulated system like GTD.
Stuff you can't define on your own because it hinges on other people, you learn how to sit there and pester them with questions and discussions until you FORCE them to define what the hell is it they want, in their minds, and therefore get it clarified by them in yours too. (This applies equally well to a boss, or to a group in a collaborative brainstorming.)
If they chuck it back in your court, then you jolly well take the opportunity with both hands and run. Aka define it yourself first. Then take it back, check if it meshes with their amorphous and ill-formed vision, get feedback and iterate it to death until it kinda-sorta fits or you run out of time, whichever comes first.
Sometimes they DON'T know how to process it themselves. That's why they ask you to do it, I wanted to tell the girl. "Please Action" is a horrible business-speak misuse of a noun into an amorphous verb. But they don't know how to figure out what the appropriate Next Action should be.
She was complaining to her friend that she then has to read all the damn mail and correspondence her boss chucks to her, and try to figure out what the hell to do from there.
Um, I wanted to say, that's life. That's work. That's you figuring out how to process amorphous stuff into doable chunks. That's GOOD. For your own personal growth and career.
Y'see, here's a little secret. Not all bosses know wtf to do. Some don't even care.
Personally, when I forward email down to my subordinates, I take the time to spell out exactly what the hell I want from them. Call it having learnt something from GTD and from the linear quest nature of MMOs, or from my own incompetent supervisor experience. Taking the time to define the work increases my chances of getting it back in a prompt manner, instead of having it chucked into a pile of "Hmmmmm" and sat on.
Call it learning from my own habits. Guilty as charged. Stuff I haven't figured out yet (and there are many, I understand the theory of GTD but it's so awful hard to put into practice and stay on the bandwagon without falling off) get completely ignored until it blows up.
Human nature, alas. We're all flawed beings.
I'm fortunate in that my own boss is leastways competent - she just loses track of all the balls she has juggling, and forgets that she hasn't defined things to certain people. So I just have to sit there and gently remind her that I haven't the foggiest idea what the next step is, and she normally has a clue.
If not, then my boss likes to engage in an out-loud discussion until she figures it out. It's not my preferred way of figuring things out (I like to brainstorm by myself first), but you live with and adapt to your boss' style.
You know the times I don't bother to spell out what I want? A couple reasons spring to mind:
- I don't really care about what happens next. They can do with it as they like.
- I expect them to know what to do from past experience
- I feel they're independent enough to decide and/or check back with me.
- Or I've given up on the person as coachable (it's wasting my time to train the person, they're not going to listen to good advice and is gonna screw it up anyway, they can dick around with their flawed judgment, I just want to distance myself from accountability/responsibility)
The last is not the healthiest or most mature type of reaction, but y'know, flawed human nature and all. Sometimes avoidance or passive-aggression is the appropriate choice for conflict situations that will resolve by themselves in a reasonable timeframe.
I'm afraid I took the latter way out in this eavesdropping situation and said nothing to the young twentysomething in the food court. Not really my business, after all. She seemed quite happy just venting. She'll figure it out, some day.
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