I used to work with this dude Matt E. at a company called Virtuoso. I sat in Texas. He sat in Seattle. I guess I had sounded “slow” on my interviews with this company, although I still got the job and took it, so for a while he was calling me “Stoner Ted” behind my back. (At the time I took this job, save for a wedding or two, I hadn’t smoked a joint in probably 15 years.) Matt E. was an absolutely classic middle manager: his entire schedule for a week was meetings and calls, he never actually created or iterated on anything, he had two kids who he clearly had more time to spend with yet would tell his wife “work is killing me this week,” and if you ever asked him a specific question about goals or priorities, he’d fumble for 129 seconds before half-answering. It was an awesome relationship.
He hated my boss, this lady Elaine, so eventually to bond with him and have new “alliances” i.e. Survivor, I would just kinda tell him the dumb shit Elaine was doing down in Texas. That worked for a while. Eventually Elaine grew to utterly despise me, and I got piped from that job. They claimed it was a stand-alone termination, but about four weeks later, they fired 12 other people, including most of Matt E’s team. From afar, that was fun to hear about. I’m petty.
Anyway.
I was in that job for 17 months. From time to time, we’d have consultants or “workforce experts” come in and they’d talk to us about new plans. Some of these stuck, but usually for a month at most. One time, the CEO heard a keynote about email management, and he returned to work and told us all that we needed to contextualize our emails, like set a time window for response and rate it 1–5 on urgency. That lasted all of two days, and then middle managers (and some executives) were back to hair-on-fire bullshit where every email was urgent and must do now. Also at that job, we did an “employee engagement survey” (third party) and when the consultants came in to reveal the results, the entire executive team was checking their emails on their iPhones during the presentation. That sent a good message.
Anyway.
Within these “new approaches to work,” consultants would often talk about how managers need to do more: this and that, bric and brac, the other thing and the new thing. Focus on listening. Focus on connection. Focus on engagement. Focus on resilience.
Most of the managers at this place — and almost every other place I’ve worked, honestly — said, “OK, that’s cool. But all my boss ever asks me about is tasks, deadlines, and completed items. And I can only advance if I’m seen as a relentless executor. Where do I find time to build resilience in others?”
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