Top ten signs you work for a micromanager

My micromanager is beyond the Pale, and answers more to the tune of a nanomanager. Check out this list, which I put together from research and cold, hard experience.

10. Follows you into the bathroom and continues to talk to you about your project status--and you're of opposite sexes.

9. Makes Captain Queeg and Captain Bligh look like management geniuses.

8. Sits in on meetings you chair, saying, "Pretend I'm not here," then hijacks meeting.

7. Never takes vacation. Does get sick from time to time, but comes to work anyway, saying, "I'm needed." Takes sick days only for major surgery, and then only while still anesthetized.

6. Claims all assignments are clear and unambiguous.

5. Won't supply clear answers to questions about ambiguous assignments.

4. Corrects the way you ask clarifying questions about ambiguous assignments.

3. Has said, "I don't like surprises," but gets obvious thrills from surprising subordinates.

2. Can't always resist the urge to tell subordinates how to use the phone system. Doesn't actually know how to use the phone system.

1. Strenuously denies micromanaging anyone, ever.

Love to know if you have more signs...suggestions for dealing with such beasts are also welcome.

Bitter, party of 1, your table is ready.

Kids, pull up a chair—I've got the mother of all rants singing in my soul and I've got to let 'er out.

I had the unavoidable pleasure of presenting my project to the company’s European marketing team this week. This group has a new VP, whom we'll call Jason, and who's based in the UK. Apparently Jason was looking for an opportunity to take it out and whip it all around to impress his new subordinates. And unbeknownst to me I was served up as the whipping girl du jour.

Firstly, I should point out that to accommodate my colleagues in Europe, I had to get up at the UNGODLY hour of 5am, chug some java, and get on the road in the DARK in order to get to the conference room on time. Man alive, I am so NOT a morning person. Archie and Vlad know not to talk to me or really even to look at me until I've been upright with coffee cup in hand for at least 60 minutes. Imagine then my state of mind going into this meeting.

These days we in the tech world conduct inter-continental meetings remotely, so my boss and I sat together in the large, empty conference room, hovered around an alien-shaped speaker phone. Really this thing looked like it could crawl off the table and install itself in my brain stem. In retrospect, I wish it had.

Slowly, the team in points East of Eden assembled and promptly muted their phones, so that I was literally and figuratively presenting to an empty room. Luckily my uber-micromanager boss kept leaning across me to adjust the contrast on my laptop screen and muting the phone as I was speaking to give me pointers on what I should say next. Can you say not-giving-me-that-confident-feeling?

And finally the crescendo of our morning-time meeting: Jason said that the campaign creative looked like "the back of a software box" and had nothing of interest in it at all. Kids, I appreciate a smartass simile as much as the next gal, but not when it's directed at me. Yes, I can dish it out and no, I can't take it. He went on but I won’t bore you or embarrass myself with the details of what he said.

I waited a few minutes and thought about telling him that his accent reminded me of back episodes of "Dr. Who" from the 70s and asking him what his personal relationship with deodorant was. I briefly considered telling him that his was the empire that crumbled and lost what turned out to be the largest world economy in history. I even thought about telling him that I hated the Beatles and rejected every contribution to pop culture that has ever come out of the British Isles.

Instead I thanked his team for their support and told him it had been a pleasure working with them. In the end, that felt better—Brits get sarcasm, don't they?

WOW: gimcrack

PRONUNCIATION: (JIM-krak)

I like this word. As a noun, it means: Something cheap and showy, of little use. As an adjective: Showy, but worthless.

I'm giddy thinking of all the ways this word applies to my workaday world. For instance, the gimcrack project I'm working on right now. I told my boss on Friday that I knew no one would use the particular aspect of the project I'm busting my butt to finish. I'd literally spoken with folks around the world who said they didn't need it. In other words, I had empirical evidence of gimcrack. You know what she said? "We promised to provide this today, so keep going."

I'm sorry? Did I inadvertently suggest that I think and apply reason to my work? Silly me.

So anyway, back to our word. Its etymology is uncertain, as my sources say: "perhaps an alteration of Middle English gibecrake (small ornament), possibly from Old French giber (to shake)." That'll clear things up, won't it?

Here's an example I really like: "Uncle Rabid Prophet TechEye has worshiped more gimcrack bits of junk and practiced more half-baked religions than all of Hollywood combined."
Bow Down And Open Your Wallet; Warsaw Business Journal (Poland); Aug 21, 2006.
Special thanks to Anu Garg for pointing out this word.

Location, Location, Location

My management has their knickers in a knot about us being physically present in the office. I know this is a small thing to complain about when so many people don’t have jobs, but this asinine request is sitting in my craw.

For five years, I worked for a large corporation from my office at home. No carbon fuels used to get there, no contribution to highway jams; I didn’t risk my life riding alongside people who were putting on makeup or texting whilst wielding around their 2-3 ton vehicles at break neck speeds. And if I needed to talk to my ob/gyn every few months, I didn’t have to whisper or give my colleagues way more information than they care to have about my menstrual cycles.

Now, that company did not put this work-from-home policy in place just to please the likes of me. And frankly, I’m sure decreasing the company’s carbon footprint was not their prime directive either, although they did find a way to work it into their PR quite often. No, kids, they did this because it was CHEAP: they realized that real estate in Cupertino and New York and Singapore is expensive.

While I’m sure the company bigwigs wouldn’t care, this policy made people stick around. Not exactly loyalty, more a matter of convenience--the philosophy enabled a great work/life balance for us working slugs. We could have dinner with our families at reasonable hours, we could take an hour off to pick up our kids from school and log back in when they’d gone to sleep, we could in other words, have a life and have a job.

Enter current company: my management says that working from home is not in their plan. They want butts in seats. They frequently walk the aisles to do what we affectionately [sic] refer to as “bed checks.” They have, in my most humble opinion, this juvenile view that unless we worker bees are visibly working away at our desks, we’re goofing off. You know, us kids, we just can’t be trusted. I say, you trust people, they respond in kind. You treat them like children, well, you get what you ask for.

So I trudge in, trying not to rub bumpers with any of the idiots who are texting their friends about the traffic or reading the newspaper, just to get on the phone and talk to the people I work with in Australia, London, and Massachusetts. Or worse, I plop down at my teeny tiny desk in my itsy bitsy cubicle in the huge warehouse that I work in, just to hear my coworkers talk into their phones to their colleagues in Milan, Chicago, and Texas. It’s maddening. I can’t think. Sometimes I got off to what’s privacy booth, which is an airless enclosed room with a phone and an Ethernet drop. Kind of like a jail cell only not as nice.

In my old job, I was known for the work I did. I was promoted twice in five years because I got things done, had good relationships with people, and was generally known as the fabulous person you’ve come to know and love. Not because of how long I sat at my desk.

What do you think?

Firedrills

Snakes alive, it happened again! I’m working away at last week’s action items when the call comes from on high: we’ve got an emergency! We need [fill in the damn blank]. It’s a different blank every time, but the urgency is always the same. Executive management is looking! Executive management needs this! Hurry!

Yours truly says, “I’m sorry, this seems stupid. Do I really need to drop everything to get this done?”

Kids, when will I learn? How will I ever be the geriatric marketing manager I need to be so that I can pay my son Vlad’s college expenses?

The furrowed brow, the tapping pen on the desk, that’s all I need from my boss to know that yes, I must! Now git!

So I git. I git so much that my head hurts. I scurry around like the little mouse that I am grabbing at straws for the big cheeses—Mush, mush!

I get statistics, I get bar charts, I get metrics galore. I put them into a report. I polish the report with snappy words and phrases. I find some graphics, I find some illustrations. I send it to her, I send it to him, I send it to all of them. And I wait. And I wait some more.

But no one ever says anything. No one ever reads the report. They’ve noticed a new shiny ball in front of their faces. They’ve got to look into this one now. What am I waiting for? Let’s get a move on! We need this, we need this now! What are you doing over there? We need you over here!

I think this is why god made vodka martinis and the people who drink them.

What do you think?

The Free World vs Engineers

What is with software engineers anyway? Have they been sent directly to the planet, bypassing the usual stops along the road of life that bring the rest of us humility, compassion, and the ability to take direction? Buckle up, kids! I’m on a rampage.

Say you’re the marketing executive whose JOB it is to come up with a product strategy. Imagine that you spend weeks creating a killer product requirements document after doing things like meeting with customers, talking to analysts, analyzing research data, only to have that document CAST ASIDE by an engineer who FELT LIKE doing something else. Can you stand it?

If you’re in the tech world, you know this happens all the time. You know that when the rest of us are meeting to plot product execution and develop roadmaps, those stinking engineers are in the BREAK ROOM playing PING PONG. And you know that some months later, when a product is released that has NOTHING TO DO with the product strategy you recommended, a product who’s functionality that the doc people can only guess at, a product that the QA people can’t imagine how to test, you KNOW that if you call a meeting with the engineers responsible, you KNOW they won’t show. Hell no! Especially not if it’s before 11am because they won’t be in yet—having stayed up till 4am playing online Dungeons and Dragons with their virtual friends in China.

You also know that when customers receive this piece of crap they’ll never disrupt their data centers to install it. Analysts and press will be stumped. Product revenue will go down, which in turn will make the stock tank and piss off the shareholders. The CEO will look to her staff saying, “The f*ck?” Her staff will look to their staffs, and so on down the line until the buck stops at your office. After all, it was YOUR JOB to write the product strategy.

I know you engineers out there have loaded your slingshots, but go ahead, I can take it.

What do you think?

Marketing These Tough Times

Have you noticed how we’re being advertized to these days? Just the other night, Archie and I were watching TV and on came a commercial for some cheap restaurant saying essentially: you don’t have much money these days so come try our $5 meals. I’m sorry, that’s just sad. Corporate marketing is all over These Tough Times, too. There’s one profitable company I know that’s taken to promoting that “this economy is going to separate the winners from the losers.” How offensive is that?

I believe that most large corporations have been opportunistically increasing their own wealth over the past six to nine months and hiding those actions under a cloak of economic hardship. I’m not saying that the economy doesn’t suck, but I am saying that perhaps our economic engines could batten down the hatches some, hold on to their workforces, and see what happens rather than shedding jobs willy nilly while simultaneously increasing share price for their stockholders. And I think our government should hold these Titans of Commerce accountable for the worsening of the economy that they’re causing by adding to the ranks of the unemployed.

Even as I type these words, I see collective eyes rolling up into collective sockets. Oh, Mary, don’t be so naïve. Next you’ll be talking about Society with a capital S and wearing love beads. But really, pals, isn’t a culture, especially a thriving, sophisticated culture like we Americans like to think we have, about more than Social Darwinism? Call me a pinko commie if you like but it really doesn’t seem extreme to me at all to ask our business community to extend some compassion to their workers. To perhaps hold off on expectations of constant increased profitability and growth while our economy rights itself. Instead we have impatient, greedy corporations taking from the poor to give to the rich [remember my pay cut and the company’s uptick in profitability?] and laying people off without conscience. All the while telling each other that they’re the strong ones; those jobless folks were too weak to make it anyhow.

Kids, perhaps I should get off my soap box and wipe the spittle from the corners of my mouth.

What do you think?

Shut up!

Kids, I know you’ve been here: 42-minutes into a scheduled 60-minute meeting and the conversation’s winding down. Maybe the boss is nearing the end of her soporific about taking your ethics training or updating your professional profile. You feel the end of the meeting coming on. You wonder if you’ll have time to get a cuppa joe. Heck, maybe you’ll even get to go to the bathroom before the start of your next meeting.

And then the boss issues the killing words, “Anybody have anything else?” or, even worse, “Let’s do a quick roundtable.”

OMG! I feel the hairs on the back of my neck rising. No! not a roundtable. Because you know no one but me is going to say, “Nothing new to report, my projects are moving along on schedule.” Oh, no. Everyone’s got to sound busy, officious, important. It has to seem like everyone’s thinking really hard, solving crises, or critically needing the boss to help them resolve an issue.

If you’re on the phone, you can roll your eyes a few times. I find that helps relieve stress. But if you’re all in a room together, it’s deadly. Then you have to look politely around as everyone yawps on about Bill not completing his dashboard items or Phyllis forgetting to contact the lawyers. [Is anyone named Phyllis anymore?]

Sometimes in meetings like that I imagine my coworkers as children, or more precisely what they were like as children. It’s easy with the engineers: they’re exactly as they are now, only smaller. [Ha! That’ll get ya to comment, won’t it, TA?] The marketeers probably all had red hair and freckles and had trouble sitting still. And the finance people…hum, tell the truth, I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a meeting with a bunch of finance people. There’s usually just the one—who tells you you can’t do what you want to do. Bored, detached, oh so fed up with you all. Or was that the attorney? And we all know what the attorneys looked like when they were children, don’t we?

What do you think?

Minions

Read a newspaper article recently that discussed how college grads are worried about getting jobs In This Economy. I have some good news for them: the two high tech companies I've had the most recent experience with are looking exclusively to hire college grads. I wonder why? Let's think about it...

One of my bosses put it out there that the company wanted to hire "junior" people. That way, her reasoning went, we seniors [not AARP members, mind you, it would be illegal to refer to our age] could have help with the grunt work as we set our sights on rising the corporate ladder. Um, okay, that's possible. But at that company, the ladder in question was chock full of rabid risers who were frantically kicking at those below. So I'm not sure the company was really interested in putting more of us on the road to success.

Another manager at that company made a mistake and told half the truth to the folks on her staff. She said that the company was looking to get new blood and new ideas in a last ditch effort to change the company's image to that of a hip, happening software company rather than the aging dinosaur that it actually was. No wonder that manager was having trouble being promoted to director.

My current company makes no bones about the truth: new college grads are cheaper. And they're malleable: make them what you want, then when they start to make more money, pitch them for newer, even younger lickspittles (great word, isn't it?).

I guess in a way I appreciate being leveled with. Or maybe as Sheryl Crowe says, lie to me.

Back to the article, tho. There's a picture of this dude sitting on a velour sofa amidst strewn dirty laundry, video game controller, a guitar, and a leopard print pillow. Did he read in a book how to look like a stereotypical college boy? Yikes! Turns out he just got his undergrad degree in history. And he's JUST NOW worrying about getting a job? What was he thinking four years ago? That McDonald's would be hiring, so no worries?

Sorry, I love history, and I love literature, but if you're gonna major in those things in college, forget about worrying about getting a job. Just have a trust fund.

What do you think?