If you're gonna decorate your walls with your "Culture of Can Do" credos—don't cry foul when someone holds you accountable to your claims:
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We manage with integrity / We listen to each other / We build trust / We act as one / We take ownership / We are talent builders / We encourage continuous improvement / We stay cool during times of change / We welcome new ideas / We help people succeed and grow / We have a bias for action / We deliver results / We are accountable / We focus on our customers’ needs /
We are a culture of can do . . .
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For the first few weeks at Sally, I worked day and night and loved every minute of it. I was exhausted day after day—and yet I would wake up raring to go. One morning I said to myself, “Dead and Alive”—in that I was energized in my exhaustion. I loved walking into Sally every day (the building on Morse Rd). I remember being so excited about working in their beautiful corporate office—only to find that I’d be working in this other location. From the outside, it’s nothing special—but from the moment I walked in the door, I found it refreshing in a way I had never felt before. It’s so bright and uplifting (the lighting, the temperature, the walls, the ceiling, the carpet, the unique coffee machine, the cubes (though lacking on some ways—overall, they were fantastic with their frosted glass and all).
There are just so many positive things I could say about that place—and “almost” all the people I worked with.
I would add that the extra hours were ramp-up time for me on MDX, so that extra time was not for billable hours (and rightly so). It was a wonderful opportunity for me to do some work I’ve been dying to get into for years, and I was willing to do whatever it took to deliver.
Once I got into a rhythm, I had the process down pretty well—so I had found my groove. I love those times when you’re under the gun and there’s so much to overcome in order to fulfill your responsibilities. It had been a long time since I felt like that, and it should have been smooth sailing from that point on.
But bad apples and inept managers have a knack for ruining a good thing.
It never ceases to amaze me that companies will fret over money while flagrantly wasting it.
We’ve created a song-and-dance culture where “presentation” is paramount—where company handbooks espouse what is glaringly absent in practice. Where you can put up a “wall of words” for company credos—while an undercurrent of systemic nonsense flows along with ease.
It takes a special kind of stupidity to put up with people who poison possibility—and then condemn the dedicated who actually live up to every word on that wall, but have the nerve to call it like it is.
I did everything I could to keep my mouth shut—letting my manager persist in his folly, because I just came here to keep my head down and diligently do my job. That someone was brazenly impeding progress on one report—in the past I never would have let that go. But if they wanna be idiotic about how they run their business—and pay somebody with bad attitude (the running joke, the resident clown, the company mascot—every company inexplicably employs these people), then have at it.
This time, I was done trying to explain the fundamentals of leadership to people who are seemingly oblivious to their bedrock responsibilities. That a manager would openly gripe about the person in question—fumbling around while trying to solve the symptoms of a problem (instead of picking up the phone for 5 minutes with the other person’s manager—to deal with the source)—is preposterous.
How could the most obvious possible solution utterly escape someone in charge?
At the heart of the problem is that most managers in IT are not real leaders—they’re typically technical people who want to move up and need to get promoted somehow. They want the money, the power, and the prestige, but they don’t really want the responsibility that comes with the job. They are usually fixated on a getting another feather in their cap, and anything that interferes with them keeping up appearances must be eliminated.
There’s a reason why I find out so much information so early on in my contracts—because I’m paying attention and listening to those who have something to say. And why do you think those colleagues confide in me? It’s because the manager is flagrantly failing them. These so-called leaders talk out of both sides of their mouth—putting on a show about how their “door is always open”—never mind how wildly out of whack they are from reality.
They’re not real managers—they’re glorified administrators who play a part. Time after time it all comes back to the “presentation”—while simultaneously shirking their inherent responsibilities.
As I put in a letter to the CEO:
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It’s a given that there’s a degree of finesse that’s required when dealing with personalities and resistance, but when that effort becomes excessive—at some point it’s an HR/managerial matter. I wrote the following many years ago: “What confounds me is why companies coddle people who epitomize the lowest common denominator. Rather than inspire them to rise to standards set by others, the meticulous are asked to accommodate the careless. Moreover, there seems to be a universal rolodex of excuses that gets spun to absolve those in question.”
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And what you think this CEO was concerned about in response to my letter?
That a contractor didn’t go through the “proper” channels to communicate his concerns.
And THAT is the BS of “The American Way—to deflect, evade, blame—whatever it takes so long as you don’t have to accept responsibility for anything. Anything goes in a culture of “I claim, therefore I am.”
And what of that “Culture of Can Do”—all that stuff about accountability, ownership, integrity, results, trust, acting as one, growth, listening, and bias for action.
Sure looks good on a wall, doesn’t it!
And last but not least—I love how all these stand-ups act as a way to disguise the obvious. There’s nothing wrong with stand-ups—I just take issue with putting up stickies while the glaringly obvious goes unaddressed.
“You’re not doing your job!”—how’s that for a sticky?
I love Bill Belichick’s outlook on teamwork: “The main point to me is that [the players] have to be coordinated, and the 10 people have to support what that 11th guy is doing, and vice versa. . . . The only way that can happen is for there to be discipline, for everyone to be disciplined enough to do their job, knowing the guy beside him is doing his, too, so that you can count on him and he can count on you, and go right down the line.”
It all goes back to fundamentals and it always will. I don’t care if you make billions for a company—if you don’t deliver on your inherent responsibilities, you’re still a failure in my eyes.
Richard W. Memmer
