Something to Aspire To
Let’s stay on our theme of managers and management, shall we?
My story from yesterday had me thinking about the kind of manager I’d like to be one day.
Which reminded me of a post I did a few years ago.
Presented for your review, a (rather effective) management style that you won’t find in any college textbooks.
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Management…hamburger style
Currently, at the building across the way, there are some gentlemen hard at work putting a new roof on the two-story structure.
Roofing has got to be some grueling, backbreaking work, and they’ve been toiling at this for a few days now.
About an hour ago, all work went quiet over there. I thought maybe they were on a break. They weren’t on a break.
It appears they were having a little conference. Seems there was a problem and they were having what they’d call in the corporate world, a “root cause analysis” discussion.
I suspect they discovered what, or rather, whom was at the center of the mistake, because I could then hear the supervisor of this project having a one-on-one mentoring conversation, loudly, with his employee.
Let’s keep this a family friendly post…for all the instances of the eff word, I will substitute a more appropriate word.
Oh let’s have fun with it, let’s use the word “hamburger.”
Here we go, a faithful recounting of this clearly very hands on and empathetic manager as he guides his employee through a big error.
Remember: hamburger = eff word
“You hamburgered up. You hamburgered this whole thing up. I didn’t hamburger up. All the rest of these hamburgering guys didn’t hamburger this thing up. What in the hamburgering hell were you thinking? You weren’t thinking and you hamburgered this hamburgering thing all to hell. What the hamburger, man?! What the hamburger happened?”
: sound of employee mumbling, trying to explain his reason for hamburgering everything up :
“You what? You what? Who the hamburger told you to do that? I sure as hell didn’t hamburgering tell you to do that! Now this whole hamburgering project is running behind and that costs hamburgering money? Do you get that? Do get that you’ve cost every hamburgering one of us some hamburgering time and some hamburgering money?”
: more mumbling :
“Aw man, what the hamburger. Get back to work!”
And with that, all the machines started up, the smell of tar once again filled the air, and the team of folks got back to roofing.
There you have it. Management by hamburgering around.
One Comment
Anji
That’s one way I suppose. At least he was told to get back to work.
A long time ago when I had a little team working under me (before I went on a leadership course) I noticed that the office was empty. Where could they be? I tracked them down to the stationary cupboard where I over heard them deciding who was going to be the unlucky one to tell me that they’d run out of magnetic encoding ribbon (it was a very long time ago). I learnt a lot in that few seconds.
They didn’t know that I knew and were so relieved that I didn’t hit the roof. We just implemented plan ‘B’ and talked about how important it was to tell someone when they knew they were going to run out of stationary.