Managers Part XVII - Who Does This Monkey Belong To?

In the last installment of "Managers" we looked at Assigning vs. Delegating and the concept of "monkeys". In order to effectively manage your management time you have to effectively juggle your boss-imposed time, the system-imposed time and your self-imposed time, all of which are components of your management time. We have looked at boss-imposed and system-imposed time in previous posts, but it's that subordinate-imposed time, which has no theoretical basis, and technically shouldn't exist, which is the biggest item that eats into your self-imposed time. The key to minimizing that which shouldn't be is for everyone to know precisely what their job entails and what it does not. Once everyone has a clear understanding of who is responsible for what, it will then always be clear who is responsible for a given action or decision. Before we get into some examples, a little bit of what minimizing subordinate-imposed time is not. It's not a manager neglecting to train a subordinate, ignoring legitimate demands on her time, or palming off the manager's tasks onto subordinates simply out of laziness. It's not letting a subordinate fail when timely intervention might have saved the day. What it is, is setting clear boundaries and then defending them, all the while keeping in mind where you and your subordinate are on the Five Levels of Freedom.

When I was a unit manager or assistant manager in several retail stores I oversaw various department managers who were responsible for operations in their departments. For each department there was a director who operated out of the central office who gave direction, set prices and determined what products were sold, but the managers in each store had a lot of freedom as regards to scheduling, ordering, signage, displays, production, hiring and overall day-to-day operations. With regard to most of their job duties they were a Level 4 - independent action, reporting to the store director or home office director after the fact or Level 5 - reporting only routinely. Some parts of the job were Level 3 - check upstairs before acting. I routinely prohibited my managers from acting at Level 2 - ask before acting, or Level 1 - wait until told. In one store where I was an Assistant Store Manager I had a Bakery Manager who consistently would show up in my office whenever a crisis hit, asking me what to do. The man seemed to be incapable of making a decision. If someone quit, he wanted to know how to write his schedule; if a piece of equipment broke down he wanted me to tell him whether or not he should fix it; he wanted me to tell him what to order for a sale or how to build his displays. This manager wanted me to do his job for him and at the same time increase my subordinate-imposed time. Writing schedules, keeping the equipment working, order and building displays was his job, not mine. Fortunately for me, I was a professional manager I didn't get sucked into this time wasting activity. The monkey belonged to him, but he wanted that simian to skip on over to my back.

In a different store with a different Bakery Manager there was a completely different mindset.  This second Bakery Manager, who unlike the first Bakery Manager who had 20 years of experience, was new to the Bakery business. Fortunately for him and for me, he had been schooled from Day One on what his job description was. He received training from bakers and other experts in the physical mechanics of running a bakery and received training from me in how to be a manager. He understood from the beginning what his job description listed as his responsibilities as well as the concept of the 5 Levels and that I wanted him at least a Level 3, preferably a 4 or 5. He never, ever came to me with a problem where he didn't have at least a proposed solution. I consider him one of my success stories as a manager.

Less obvious examples of monkeys jumping onto your back from their proper home include subordinates sending you emails asking for your input on matters that they should have figured out for themselves; subordinates leaving for vacation and leaving critical tasks undone for you to complete; or subordinates telling customers or vendors to call you regarding an item that they should have handled.

A manager can't, however, get to this point overnight. You have to train your people so that they have the ability to do their job, you have to communicate with them so that there is no question what their job is, and most importantly you have to delegate, give them Level 4 or 5 authority to do their jobs. You'll never eliminate, nor should you want to, eliminate all interaction with your subordinates, and they should be comfortable coming to you with intractable problems. There will always be things that don't neatly fit within the written job description, and there will always be situations that need your touch. But don't get sucked in to doing your subordinates job for them.

Happy Holidays

Two years ago while delivering UPS packages I said "Merry Christmas" to customers whom I encountered; until I ran into a "War on Christmas" guy. He thanked me for saying "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays" and started on a rant about he says "Merry Christmas" to stick it to all those atheists and liberals who want to ruin Christmas. A few years before that I was treated to a similar "thank you" and accompanying rant by someone who was appreciative that my store's ads said "Christmas Savings" (they actually ran ads that said both "Christmas" and "Holiday Savings"). Every year I read Facebook posts from people who proudly proclaim that they're saying "Merry Christmas" whether anyone likes it or not, sometimes suggesting that "Happy Holidays" or "Season's Greetings" are somehow subversive. And now we have a President who has vowed that we'll all be saying "Merry Christmas" as if it's been outlawed or something. (To be fair I had a pagan acquaintance of mine some years ago tell me that he would not respect me or any other pagan who said 'Merry Christmas", so it's not all one-sided, and be fair again, I greeted the Governor, a right-wing hyper-partisan if there ever was one, last year with a hearty "Happy Holidays", and he returned the salutation with a "Happy Holidays" of his own)

No one is trying to take the Christ out of Christmas, there is no War on Christmas.

We all should be free to use whatever greeting that pleases us without being "corrected". We also shouldn't use our choice of greeting as a weapon against those who employ different greetings, or observe different holidays.

If you run into me and say "Merry Christmas", I won't be offended, even though I'm not a Christian, and I don't expect you to be offended if I say "Happy Holidays". Or even "Snappy Saturnalia".

Shopping No-Nos (Don't Do These Things)

Some of the items on this list were annoyances when I worked in retail, some were born as I stood in line, all of them might get you killed some day. (Not all are holiday related)

• Expressing sympathy that a cashier or waiter has to work on a holiday is not cool. They either already know that it sucks to be there, in which case you are just rubbing salt in the wound, or they didn't have anything going on anyway and are happy to be getting time and a half for doing the same work as usual.
• Complaining that all the "good" turkeys are gone when you are shopping the night before Thanksgiving; all the Snickers are sold out Halloween afternoon; or basically that any seasonal item has sold out before the actual holiday. Most seasonally themed products won't sell once the holiday has come and gone. Retailers try to anticipate sales, but they aren't fortune-tellers. Buy your shit early.
• Pointing out that an item is cheaper at Walmart. Fuck you then, shop at Walmart. 
• Trying to make "deals" on items that are already on sale. Or any item for that matter. 
• Asking for custom cuts of meat. Do you really require your roast to be that exact weight? (I once had a guy like this; he couldn't ever buy meat from the case, it had to be custom cut. Once the meat cutters pre-cut his meat to his usual specifications, wrapped it and put it in the case; he still wanted them to custom cut it). 
• Be prepared to pay when all your items have been rung up. They will always ask you for money! Don't start digging for your wallet, card or checkbook after the order has been totaled. If you're writing a check, you know what store you're in and the date, surely you can fill that part out ahead of time.
• When paying in cash, don't throw your money down on the moving belt. The cashier is probably holding out her hand to accept payment, it's rude not to hand it to her - she doesn't have Ebola. Also, the moving belt can possibly whisk your money under the register, never to be found again. 
• Complaining about lines during a busy time. Hey knucklehead, everyone had the same idea as you did. They can only move so fast, and besides, someone is digging for their wallet up ahead of you. 
• And don't ever expect special treatment because you say you know the owner. The employees know him too and don't like him. 

Grammar: Commas

Several years ago I worked with someone who, though otherwise quite intelligent, had only a tenuous grasp of the rules of English grammar. Someone had told her that people didn't use commas enough, so she started inserted commas everywhere in her writing. The fist sentence in this post might look like this:
Several years ago, I worked with someone, who, though otherwise, quite intelligent, had only a tenuous grasp, of the rules of English grammar. 
While it's probably true that the comma is underutilized, it's also possible to overutilize it.

The basic mistake that many people make with respect to commas is that you don't use them every time there would be a pause if what you are writing is being spoken aloud. In short, a comma is used to separate parts of a sentence from one another. Here are a few ways that a comma should be used correctly:

• Before a coordinating conjunction (and, but, or so, yet) that links two independent clauses (an independent clause has both a subject and a verb and can stand on its own as a sentence). For example "I went running, and I saw a duck". If the sentence is changed to "I went running and saw a duck" no comma is needed because the second half is not an independent clause. 
• After a dependent clause that starts a sentence (a dependent clause has a subject and a verb, but cannot stand on its own), as in the sentence "When I went running, I saw a duck". If the dependent clause is at the end of the sentence a comma is not needed, but can be added for emphasis. 
• Use commas to offset explanatory, but unnecessary, information in the middle of a sentence. "When I went running I saw a mallard, a type of duck". "A type of duck is explanatory, but the sentence can stand without it.
• To set off items in a series. There is some disagreement about whether a comma follows the last item in the series (called an Oxford Comma) is necessary, however, more often than not it clarifies the situation. "When I went running I saw some ducks, Charlie, and Bill." This obviously tells us that I saw some ducks, but also saw Charlie and Bill. "When I went running I saw some ducks, Charlie and Bill." This version of sentence could mean that the ducks that I saw were named Charlie & Bill. 

The following link gives nine more examples of the proper use of commas. 

http://www.businessinsider.com/a-guide-to-proper-comma-use-2013-9

And this link simplifies it all into three rules.

http://www.writewithjean.com/usage-and-grammar/commas-made-simple/

That's a lot of rules. I try to narrow it down to:

1. Use a comma in a list of items
2. Use a comma to separate different ideas or thoughts within a sentence. 
3. Don't use it to indicate a pause or a breath. 

Grammar: Writing Like You Speak

Why are there rules of grammar? It's not to make people feel stupid, it's not to give some people a sense of superiority, it's a road map that facilitates communication. There's nothing wrong with jargon, colloquialisms, slang and the like, but if you're communicating to a broad, mixed audience, there has to be a common language if our words are to be understood.

One of the mistakes many people make when writing is to write the same way that they speak, complete with tangents, stops & starts, and lack of structure or direction. When you are speaking, especially when you're speaking in person, face-to-face, you have the benefit of tone of voice, volume, facial expression and body language to help clarify any ambiguities. You also have the advantage of reading the other person's facial expressions and body language to determine whether you are being understood. You have the option of repeating, rephrasing or or explaining what you meant. None of this is possible when writing, so it is critical that the words used when writing be as clear and unambiguous as possible. Proper use of punctuation is just as important. Periods, commas, exclamation points and other punctuation marks can stand in for pauses and points of emphasis that might occur in speech, but also help identify changes in subject and categorization of ideas.

This is not to suggest that you should never use your own vocabulary, native idiom or jargon when writing; a lot depends on your intended audience. What I am suggesting is that you refrain from simply putting down words as they pop into your head, rather thinking through the point that you wish to make and how to make that point clearly.

Managers Part XVI - The Monkeys

The class and book Managing Management Time described the responsibility to take some kind of action as a "monkey". If it was your responsibility to get something done, then "the monkey" was on your back. Before we get deep into the jungle, let define some terms. Most people define "delegate" as any action that someone else has to do so that you don't. We, however, are going to define "delegate" in conjunction with "assign". When you assign a task to someone, you have told them what to do, and when to do it. Sometimes you even tell them how to do it. (Rarely do you tell them why it's being done.) For example you tell your janitor to clean the bathroom, when he is done you tell him to sweep the sidewalk, when that is done you tell him to organize the storage closet. Or you can give him a list at the beginning of his shift:

1. Clean the bathroom
2. Sweep the sidewalk
3. Organize the storage closet

Or...you can give him the responsibility to keep the store clean and organized. 

The first is assigning; you give your subordinate tasks. Think back a few lessons to the Five Levels - this sounds a lot like Level 2 or even Level 1. But when you give someone responsibility, then you have delegated. This is more like Level 3 or 4. But in order for delegation to be effective, i.e. you get the results that you desire without a lot of hands-on involvement, you have to train your subordinate to the point where they completely understand the responsibility that you have given them and you have to give them the authority to carry out their delegated tasks. What this means is that you have to be confident enough to let go of the responsibility and let your delegated subordinate handle it without unnecessary interference from you. In the case of our janitorial example, you don't even want the janitor checking with you before cleaning or organizing, you want Level 4 freedom! Now, when you have passed this responsibility on, taking away any but routine involvement, then the metaphorical monkey has been transferred from your back to his.  

Unfortunately, it's not always clear who a monkey belongs to, and your subordinates and your bosses alike will attempt to get you to take ownership of monkeys that aren't yours. So how can you reliably determine who a monkey belongs to? It's all tied int to the Five Levels of Freedom, which we will look at in the next installment. 

Managers Part XV - The Holidays

When you're in management the holidays can be a joyful time, or they can be hell, it all depends on the kind of business that you're in. Currently I work in an office for a government agency and get most holidays off; the nature of the work is such that holidays aren't any busier than any other time of year. However, for almost two decades I worked in a retail grocery store - every holiday is busy when you work in a grocery store. In general it can be more than twice as busy in the days leading up to a holiday, but no matter how clearly you communicate, there will always be people who want to take off during the busiest times. There are several types of managers, each handling the situation differently:

1. The nice guys who approve every time-off request. These are the managers who don't know how to say no and find that instead of "all hands on deck" they are actually shorthanded when they can least afford it. While the people who take off believe that these are "good" managers, somebody still has to work, and there is much irritation and low morale with those who get stuck working. 
2. The managers who believe that seniority or position entitles them to take off and leave the work to subordinates.  When the holiday, Christmas Eve, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July etc comes up, the managers and senior (i.e. most experienced) people all take off, leaving the store at its busiest to assistants, newbies and high school kids.
3. Some managers make no changes at all. In the company that I worked for, there were stores where there were no extra people scheduled on the day before Thanksgiving (one of the top three busiest days of the year) and no senior management in the store past 6:00PM, their normal quitting time. 
4. Those who demand "all hands on deck" and work the busy shifts themselves. No vacations, nobody leaves early, especially the managers.

I was always a #4 manager. I learned this gradually. My first holiday as an assistant store director I was scheduled until 5:00PM, but couldn't ever leave on time and ended up working 13-14 hour days due to poor planning. My boss was a #1 manager, so a lot of the work fell on a select few of us who were serious about getting the store in tip-top shape. I was able to put my #4 management plan into shape after getting transferred to another store where the store director was open to changing things up for holiday scheduling. Managers were required to work at least a half day on their weekend day off leading up to the holiday and were required to work later shifts. No one got the day before the holiday off or the holiday itself, depending on which as the busiest day. No vacations were approved during the busy times. We would allow occasional exceptions for employees who had unique situations, but it was definitely an exception and not the rule. The store director and I, however, scheduled ourselves for weekend and late night shifts, putting ourselves in the same boat as everyone else. Of course, not every one liked this method of scheduling: one manager ended up getting fired because she took out her frustration at not getting the December 22 - January 4 off at other employees, verbally abusing them until we had to let her go. Occasionally employees would seek transfers to other stores so that they could take half of the month of December off. 

As a retail manager, I didn't necessarily enjoy having to work every holiday, but I understood that it was part of the job, and didn't allow subordinates to act as if they didn't work in retail. One of the jobs of a manager is to communicate the expectations to his or her subordinates and require compliance with those expectations. Jobs, despite what some politicians believe, do not exists because business owners altruistically want to provide a living to those in the community; they exist because there is a need for people to carry out specific tasks at a specific place and a specific time; and there's more of those tasks at certain times. It is understandable that an employee would want to put family gatherings or personal needs first, but if that means that the job for which they were hired goes undone, perhaps they are in the wrong business. 

When Will Sexual Harassment Be BAD, Not Just Bad for Business?

If asked directly, few people will say, out loud, that sexual harassment isn't a bad thing. However we've seen from recent events, that a lot of rationalizing goes on in the minds of people who sexually harass others. The rationalizing is done not only by individuals, but by corporations, even those that have clear sexual harassment policies. Why do many companies have written polices stating a zero tolerance for sexual harassment? Because it's wrong? Perhaps for some, but for many it's simply because allowing sexual harassment at work will get them sued. You simply have to look at how a lot of the high profile cases are handled: the offenders are kept on while the accusers are payed off; since there's no lawsuit, the offender stays on. In the case of companies like Fox News, it's only when advertisers start to go away that the offender is finally fired.

And lest you think that this kind of negotiable outrage only happens at huge corporations, I witnessed this syndrome at a company for which I worked.

I was an assistant manager at a locally-owned grocery store. A technician for our HVAC company was regularly making lewd comments to a sixteen year old employee. She went to the store manager and the complaint made its way to the technician's employer, which immediately fired him. But this wasn't the end of the story. Shortly thereafter, the fired technician started his own HVAC company. An assistant manager at one of the stores, friends with this man, provided him with a quantity of bills from his old company, which he used to underbid his old company for a contract with the grocery chain. (Yes, that's some unethical stuff, but not the subject of this blog). Despite the executive committee of the grocery chain knowing about this man's history, they contracted with him to be the main HVAC company for half the company's stores. At least two of us within the company regularly pointed out to the company's leaders the hypocrisy of claiming to have a zero tolerance policy with regards to sexual harassment, yet doing business with this man, yet he continued to receive the company's business until a completely unrelated series of incidents ended his contract. A consultant with whom the company did regular business made sexually explicit comments to female employees on several occasions, but was never confronted. Why were these men given business despite actions that would have resulted in termination if they had been employees? Because there was no legal liability to the grocery company for the words or actions of contractors. There was no chance that it would cost the company money, so it wasn't a problem for them.

Therein lies the problem: whether it's Fox News, or a local grocery chain, businesses take action when it costs them more money to maintain the status quo than to take action. Fox News didn't see it as a problem until advertisers started leaving en masse. My old company didn't see it as a problem at all. The people who run businesses in this country have to decide that sexual harassment is wrong and take action, not because their action prevents a lawsuit, but because it's wrong. Until then, nothing really changes.

Grammar: Quotation Marks

Why are there rules of grammar? It's not to make people feel stupid, it's not to give some people a sense of superiority, it's a road map that facilitates communication. There's nothing wrong with jargon, colloquialisms, slang and the like, but if you're communicating to a broad, mixed audience, there has to be a common language if our words are to be understood.

One of the most commonly misused parts of standard American English is the quotation mark. A certain national elected official misuses them on a regular basis, here are a few guidelines for using quotation marks:

1. They are used when quoting someone. Well, that seems obvious! A quote is not a summary or a paraphrase, it is repeating exactly what was said or written. There are rules for inserting clarifying words within a quote which I won't get into, but if you change the wording, it's not a quote and doesn't take equation marks. 
2. Quotation marks can indicate sarcasm or irony. For example: Bart was out with his "girlfriend" last night on O Street. Putting "girlfriend" in quotes tells us that we should doubt whether this person was actually Bart's girlfriend. Another example is: Our "leader", Mayor Smith, is on the ballot again this year. The use of quotation marks here clearly says that Mayor Smith is anything but a leader. 
3. When you are writing about a specific word, that word can be enclosed in quotes, like the second use of the word "best" in the previous example (and the use of the same word in this example)
4. In a book, the chapters can be identified using quotes while the book title is italicized; similarly, a story in a newspaper should be in quotes while the name of the newspaper is italicized. Use quotes when what is being described is a part of something larger. 
5. They are not used for emphasis. Underlining, bolding, italicizing, highlighting are all ways to emphasize a word or a phrase. Our football team is the "best" in the state. This sentence does not emphasize the word "best", in fact it indicates that the writer is using the word sarcastically. 

#5 is by far the most egregious misuse of quotation marks. Usually it's fairly obvious from the context what the writer is trying to say, but sometimes it muddies the waters and causes confusion. 

Dead Begonia Haiku

My begonias died

Too many frosts in a row

I guess Winter's here

Managers Part XIV - Management Time vs. Vocational Time

One of the false yardsticks that you hear all the time is that a good manager isn't "afraid to get his hands dirty", or "helps out". As we have already looked at, the job of a manager is to "get things done", not "do things". Before we get into the details of using leverage to get things done, we're going to look at another division of time: management time vs. vocational time.

Very few people start their careers as managers. In typical fashion the first rungs on the corporate ladder involve doing things: making things, selling stuff, serving people, repairing items. It is during this epoch where your worth as an employee is measured by your output, you learn that everything that you do can be measured. How many widgets did you produce? How fast did you ring up those orders? How many errors per thousand did you make? Quality comes into it as well; did you repair that vacuum cleaner correctly? But it's all about doing things and doing them according to standard. In most companies the path to a bigger paycheck lies along the management track. You start out making widgets, soon you're a widget team leader, responsible for some other widget makers, eventually you're the widget department manager, responsible, not only for all the widget makers and team leaders, but the budget, payroll, supply ordering and shipping. Even though you now have all these additional responsibilities, in your heart, you're still a widget maker. You wear a little leather tool belt that carries your needle nose pliers and little screw driver that you use to assemble widgets. Once or twice a day you head down to the widget room to make a few widgets and build some camaraderie with your team. When you have some free time you're back down there. Why? There are three broad categories of vocational lures:

1. Identity: this is who you are, a widget maker! Once you become a manager, you're not just a manager, you're a widget manager. Very few people identify as a manager, i.e. a practitioner of the craft of management, but rather as a member of the vocation from which you were promoted.   
2. Pride of Craft: before you were a manager you could point to what you produced and be proud of it. You could see the widgets, or the displays that you built. You can't see management
3. Instant Feedback: When you're doing things, you know when you're done, you know when it's complete. Even if it's just paperwork. You're always right there where it's happening. But as a manager, since you're planning, fixing, correcting, training, observing etc., you're either at the scene after everything is completed, or anticipating the scene before it happens. If something goes wrong you find out about it afterwards. You don't get that endorphin rush from getting things accomplished because what you're doing may not bear fruit for days or weeks or years. 

None of this means that a manager never does physical work. On the contrary, many management jobs include a physical component. In my previous career, a department manager was required, due to labor constraints, to do a certain amount of stocking and cleaning. In my current job, statutory requirements necessitate that many tasks be done by a manager because the law says so. The definition of vocation vs. management time will vary depending upon the job description and staffing levels. Stocking the yogurt on a Monday morning may be necessary for a manager in a small grocery store, but unnecessary vocational time in a large superstore. In short, anything that is not in the manager's job description, but is in the job description of a subordinate, is vocational time and should not be indulged in by a manager. There is nothing intrinsically vocational about a task, as long as it isn't supposed to be done by someone else. 

Some managers cannot seem to grasp this concept and make several classes of excuses to continue to be vocationally occupied:

• "If you want something done, do it yourself" - which presupposes that you be everywhere at once, and did a bad job of training your subordinates
• "I want my people to know that I am willing to do anything that I ask them to do" - admittedly this has short term benefits - the crew thinks you're a good guy - but what about the jobs that you are really bad at?
• "We were really busy"/"We were really shorthanded" - there may be times when it is necessary to lend a hand, but what you're doing is training your people forgo thinking and just expect you to jump in. 

Most first-level supervisory jobs still require a large amount of vocational time and a small amount of management time, say 30 hours vocational and 10 hours management, with the amount of vocational decreasing and the management component increasing as your amount of responsibility rises. What happens, however, if you insist on spending the same amount of time "in the trenches" as you did when you weren't a manager, your work week will expand. The reason that your work week will expand is that if you're keeping your vocational component at 40 hours, in your first management job in the example earlier in this paragraph, you will be working 50 hours (10 management and 40 vocational). And you're only getting paid for 40, since you're on salary - but hey, 50 hours isn't bad, right?. But as you move up in rank, the management portion will increase, so if you're still dead set on spending all that time "doing things", pretty soon you'll find yourself working 70 hours a week (30 management and still 40 vocational). Your subordinates are all used to this, so trying to cut back will leave you, in effect, short-handed. 

It's a trap...but there is a way out...

Did You Know That Not Everybody Is The Same Religion As You?

It's easy to assume that everybody thinks like you do when everybody around you 

does think like you. 

When it comes to religion, a vast majority of people in the United States are Christians of one flavor or another. Nebraska is even more homogeneous in its religious leanings, a small Nebraska town might have a Presbyterian Church on one side of town and a United Church of Christ on the other side of town...and people think that they're different! Christianity is so much the default position for spirituality that even people who don't attend church, don't pray, don't have any spiritual tendencies at all, would be appalled and insulted if you suggested that they weren't Christian. But the truth is that there are a variety of different faiths and people who lack faith as well. There are Hindu temples, mosques, Buddhists, Baha'i, Wiccans and (gasp) atheists...in Lincoln they're all over! Yet many of these "others" are viewed as aberrations, somehow spiritually wrong.

Now if Christianity, or for that matter Islam or any other religion had objective proof, or even a hint that their faith was the correct one, that would be one thing, but there isn't a religion out there that can present any kind of proof, however small, that what they believe is right. Now some folks will say that there is proof, that, for example they prayed for something and it happened! Well, people from other religions pray and claim the same results, so we're deadlocked there. Another thing that most people don't consider, even when they claim to have "talked with God" (i.e. God talking back!) or "experienced God's love", when pressed to recount in detail exactly what they experienced, usually describe a very subjective feeling, that may, if you take their word for it, indicate the existence of some deity of some kind, but doesn't all all indicate that the warm, fuzzy feeling comes from the god who ordered all the Amalekites killed, knocked down the walls of Jericho and wrote on then tablets. In other words, it is a subjective spiritual experience that the recipient chooses to label in a familiar manner.

But we have A BOOK that was given to us by GOD! Really? What you have is a collection of books that someone claims was given by God. So why should the subjective religious experiences written down thousands of years ago and copied and recopied and translated and mistranslated, in a culture very unlike our own, trump our own religious experience today?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against Christianity or even religion in general, and I'm by no means an atheist (although I sometimes act like one and often take their side in an argument) but the position that any one faith is THE one true way to look at things is arrogant and misguided.

So get off your high horse and stop condescending to those who are different, stop thinking that they're going to a hell that they don't believe in and that you need to convert them!

Happy Halloween!

Managers Part XIII - The System

It likely came as no surprise that your boss has a legitimate claim on your time, maybe a bit more of a surprise that your subordinates had a legitimate claim on your time, but what's this about the system having a claim on your time? We're going to define the system as anything and anyone who is not in your chain of command, but whom you have to deal with and/or keep happy as part of your job. For many businesses this includes the customers, suppliers, and vendors. It probably goes without saying that you have to treat your customers right, whatever that entails in your business, and to pay your vendors and suppliers on time. But it also includes those who are part of your company, but whom you don't directly answer to. This could include Human Resources, Accounting, Tech Support, or Janitorial. Some of the people in these other departments may be at the same level as you in the organizational chart, some may be on the same level as your boss, some may have positions that don't translate neatly into the hierarchy. But they all make up the system that you have to deal with. They all have procedures, and maybe even paperwork that you have to fill out before you can make a legitimate claim on their time. How well you get along with these other departments can determine how strictly they decide to enforce their requirements and how often they "cut you a break". If most of the time you follow their rules, don't go over their heads, and don't make unreasonable demands, then you've got some good interdepartmental credit that you can draw upon in an emergency. For example, at the government agency where I work there is a defined procedure for resolving computer problems. It's not very difficult, but it can take a while to get a result. Unfortunately I require computer access to do 90%+ of my job and my computer was not functioning the other morning. I know that the normal procedures would cause me to be non-productive for a good portion of the morning, so I walked over to the IT department and asked for some help. Since I never before had jumped the line and get along well with all of the tech people, I was up and running in about five minutes. They could have easily made me follow procedures, "paying full price" for what I needed, but since I had good credit with IT that I had not squandered, I was given a "discount" on the time it took. On the other side of the coin, several years ago I was managing a grocery store. The various stores usually helped one another out by transferring items from stores that had a surplus to stores that were short a product. The procedure was to call ahead, ask if you could spare item xyz, and find out when would be a good time to pick it up. This allowed the store that was transferring out the time to organize the transfer without disrupting their own operations. One particular store manager never called ahead; he just sent one of his subordinates with a list of things that they needed. The first time we chalked it up as inexperience, the second time to an emergency, but it kept happening, even after we asked that procedures be followed. After a while we stopped helping this manager - he had ruined his credit with us.

There are many examples, some that you could think of, where cooperation and help from another department, or even from your peers in the same location would make your work day proceed smoother. There are a lot of people on your team that are neither boss nor subordinate that can make or break your day. If you are spending all of your time battling the system, your self-imposed time might be shrunk to nothing.

The other part of the system involves reports, those you read and those you produce. This includes emails, trade publications, tracking, forecasting, payroll and whatever else you have to involve yourself in that doesn't involve direct interaction with another human being. There are a few ways to handle these items. One is to delegate. Does everything that you do necessarily have to be done by you? Is there someone else who would benefit by reading that report, or by answering those emails? Is it really someone else's job and not yours?

Does the report even have any impact on your job? Years ago the store director that I worked for asked all of the department managers to report the dollar amount of their waste every week. One of the managers refused to do it, claiming that the head guy wasn't doing anything with the information. I thought that he had a point, so for a couple of weeks I just made up numbers and put the report on the boss' desk, which he proceeded to file away unread. There was another incident where a central office supervisor required that we enter sales numbers in a database in order to project sales and labor. I thought that I had a better way to do it, but had to use this other guy's system. After a while I stopped changing the numbers and just changed the date every week. He never noticed. This is a strategy known as benign neglect. If you leave something undone, and no one notices, you probably don't need to do it. Furthermore, if you make it look like you're reporting something and no one sees that the information is fake, or isn't changing, then they don't really care about the information, only that you are obeying their order. You have freed up the time that you would have spent compiling information that no one will look at or care about and can spend that time wisely, managing, rather than stupidly following orders. 

Notice that I haven't trotted out the usual time management tips like "make a list" or "prioritize. I used to tell my subordinate managers that I was paying them to think. Think about what parts of the system can be eliminated and eliminate them. We've touched upon the skill of knowing what you should be doing and what you should delegate. Coming up in the next installment, management time vs. vocational time.

Managers Part XII - Minimizing Your Boss-Imposed Time

Most people, no matter how high they are on the company organizational chart have a boss. Even CEOs have a board of directors, and most businesses have customers that have to be kept happy. Managers are generally looked upon as people who get to tell others what to do, which is somewhat true, but they also have others telling them what to do. The five levels of freedom apply to the manager in his role as managEE as well as in his role as managER. In the role as manager, the goal is to get subordinates as high as possible on the freedom scale in order to minimize the theoretically nonexistent subordinate-imposed time. Minimize, or even eliminate that theoretical ghost and you're left with the three theoretically valid demands on a manager's time: boss-imposed time, system-imposed time and self-imposed time.

Unless your goal is to get fired, you cannot evade boss-imposed time. In most companies there is a hierarchy, and the person above you in the hierarchy gets to tell you what to do. The starting point is the kind of manager that your immediate supervisor is. Is your manager a professional manager, i.e. one who understands the principles of managing management time, including the five levels of freedom?  Or do you work for a micro-manager? Or perhaps even a hands-off manager? An example of a manager who manages at Level One would be one who gathers all of his subordinate managers together at the beginning of the day and hands out assignments.These assignments might include a to-do list and would definitely involve the managers' manager checking everyone's work at the end of the day, or maybe even at several points during the day. No one is ever given a chance to make a decision. A Level Two boss might operate in a similar fashion, but would dispense with the meeting, but would expect all the managers to come to him and ask what they should do that day. In reality, no boss acts like this all the time. Some might, in some areas of their oversight, hand out assignments, especially in the training phase of a new manager's career; or they might tolerate an inexperienced manager asking how to handle a situation. In my own management career, there have been times when my own supervisor acted as a Level One manager, telling me to undertake a task that had not been on my own self-to-do-list. Examples might include starting a new sales initiative, changing priorities in some area or just indulging the boss' whim. However, most managers do most of their managing at a Level Three or above, typically at a Level Four. At a Level Three, your boss is still micro-managing, i.e. still requiring his stamp of approval at every step. If your manager is not on-site, this is obviously a difficult situation. Level Four, where you make all your own decisions, but reporting after the fact, is typical for most management decisions. Level Five, where reporting is done only at regular intervals, is rare, except with very routine tasks. The reality is that most managers will have some areas where they will allow you free reign and others where they keep you on a tight leash, and most where you're somewhere in the middle.

So, how do you minimize that boss-imposed time? You have to manage your boss. How do you do that? That depends on the primary mode of management that your boss employs. If it's Level One or Two, honestly, you've got a lot to overcome. You've got one of those bosses who believe that it's the manager's job to "work hard" and to have his fingers in every pie. You've got one of those managers who believes "if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself". You've got one of those managers who views his subordinate managers merely as higher-paid grunts. Making your own decisions, or even suggesting actions, might be interpreted as insubordination. On the other hand, the manager who lets you operate at Level Five all the time probably doesn't exist in the wild! Managers who habitually manage from Level Four or Five can be categorized as "hands-off" managers. This shouldn't always be considered a good thing. Very rarely can everything be put in these top levels. A true hands-off manager is probably just lazy and doesn't want to actually manage, just sit back as a figurehead. Most managers are going to be in the Level Two - Level Four range, with occasional forays into Levels One & Five, depending on the task. To use a grocery store as an example, your daily & weekly ordering might be Level Four, or even Level Five, something he has no reason to get involved in. Your holiday displays and ordering might be in Level Three, where you make the decision on what displays to build and what to order, but he gets to weigh in and make the final decision. Staffing might be Level Two, you ask him what to do about hiring. Once in a while there might be a Level One moment, your boss gives you an assignment in area that you had not considered.

Managing your boss in most cases involves anticipating what decisions he would have made before he makes them, and building a track record of making good decisions. If your boss' comfort level is Level Three, the way to get to a regular Level Four is for him to agree with most of the decisions that you run by him, and this requires that you know what your boss' priorities are and what he thinks is important. Eventually he will realize that every decision that you run by him succeeds spectacularly and will move you into Level Four. When you're at Level Two the role of anticipation is even greater, since your boss is expecting you to ask what to do; having a solution ready is a sneaky way to get yourself up to Level Three. The only to be slapped back down to Level Two is to be told to stop having ideas - very unlikely. Moving from a Level Four to a Level Five is in some ways the easiest - you already have the freedom to make decisions without clearing them with the boss, all you have to do is to negotiate the gap between reports!

The point of all of this is that there is one person who is responsible for the Level at which your manager manages you...it's you. It's not your boss' responsibility to make your life easier, it's your job to take the initiative. The reality is that you're never going to eliminate boss-imposed time, but by careful managing of your manager, you can minimize it and increase your self-imposed time.

My Journey - Part Four

So what conclusions have I drawn in this journey? Some time over the last few years I decided to get honest with myself. Anyone who has spent any time around me knows how skeptically I view prayer. People pray for things to happen (or for hurricanes to pass them by) and sometimes things turn out as prayed for and sometimes they don't. People who believe in prayer tend to magnify the times when "prayer works" and ignore or explain away the times that it doesn't turn out according to their prayers. What about magic? What about spells? Witches and pagans perform various rituals in order to get things to turn out the way that they want. Moon magic, astrology, candles etc. But don't witches and pagans do the same thing that Christians do when it comes to prayer? Don't they tend to magnify the positive results and ignore or rationalize the negative? And do you know what? What I think are rationalizations could very well be the "correct" answer. Maybe the gods are capricious, maybe you just didn't do the ritual correctly, maybe it was the wrong phase of the moon. Who knows? I'm reminded of something I've heard said about moon magic more than once. If you need to receive something in your life, do the ritual during the waxing moon. But what if it's the waning moon and you can't wait? Easy! Just do a ritual to remove whatever it is that's preventing you from receiving what you need? To me that thinking sounds a bit ridiculous, in this scenario the phase of the moon is irrelevant as long as you phrase your intention correctly.

So do I believe that there is any reason to do rituals, burn candles, read tarot cards, etc? I do, but mainly as a way to focus the mind and to stir natural intuition. I think that, to a certain extent we can see the future. Not in a science fiction way. The future, from our point of view, hasn't happened yet, but we can ascertain patterns in the present, assemble possible paths based on the current trends and come up with a personal path to reach the desired result. Might there be supernatural intervention involved in this exercise? Perhaps, but it doesn't require supernatural intervention.

What about the existence of gods? Are they real? I guess it depends on your definition of "real". One of my spiritual practices involves meditation through shamanic journeying. The short version of what this is, is that I get into a state of altered consciousness, usually through the use of rhythmic drumming and see things in what feels like a waking dream state. Are the things that I see "merely" dreams, or do they have an objective reality? Are they parts of my subconscious that I am accessing? My contention is that it makes no difference. Since I'm not going to go out and try to fly from a high building, or murder someone because I'm "hearing voices", it doesn't really matter. One thing that I am clear about is that the various gods and goddesses, if they exist objectively and independently, do not account for natural phenomena. The god of storms doesn't make it rain, the goddess of the harvest doesn't cause the crops to grow. I look at the pantheon as personifications of natural forces, not individuals who are actively controlling their "areas of responsibility".

Although in some ways I act like an atheist, in that I do not make decisions based on what I think spiritual forces want me to do, and I think that natural events are just that: natural, I haven't ruled out the existence of spirits, I just don't see much evidence that they are very reliable.  

My Journey - Part Three

Having jettisoned Christianity, I still held to the prevailing view that there was some kind of spiritual otherworld, and that in some fashion gods, spirits and the like existed. I hadn't rejected the very idea of a god, or influencing events supernaturally, I had just come to the conclusion that Christianity had no more claim on being right than any other religion; that other religions were just as likely or unlikely to be true or effective. Being predominately Irish in ancestry, I began to examine and study what I could find out about pre-Christian Irish (Celtic) religion. Due to the fact that very little was written down regarding Irish religion before its displacement by Christianity, there isn't a lot of hard information about it. What is written was written by outsiders (Julius Caesar) and by Christians writing many years after the fact. Although there are modern people who claim to know what it was that the Druids did and the functions of the pantheon and day-to-day religious practices,  it's almost all speculation. How much truth there is in the speculation is the subject for another blog post, but due to this lack of hard information, my quest for information about my ancestral religion wasn't particularly fruitful. However, there are people who claim to be following the "old religion", and those people can largely be found within the various Wiccan and Neo-Pagan groups. The books that I found were mostly books about Magic and rituals, and some that promulgated a kind of pan-Pagan outlook, mixed with divination, meditation and influencing events by magic. It was around this time that I met my future wife who was involved in a local eclectic pagan group. I too became involved in this group and considered myself a Pagan.

I should point out that one of things that I did not want to do when shopping around for a new religion, was to get involved in another dogmatic faith. In addition to my doubts about the Bible, as a result of my bad experiences with The Way, I had also developed a strong aversion to groups, especially to anyone who claimed to have all the answers. For a few years I attended local gatherings and even learned to read tarot cards, but I mainly continued to read, study and form opinions on my own. I anted a spiritual worldview that I could call my own and which worked for me.

I'm going to digress for a moment on the subject of "personal religion". Those who follow a religion with a central authority, especially for those who use the Bible (or some other "holy" book) as their standard often deride those who construct their own systems of belief as "made-up" religious and ethical systems. But isn't that what most people do, even when part of a religion? How many Christians really know what the Bible says about their God, or what behavior their Bible encourages? How many people believe that God acts in a certain way when there is no evidence from the Bible to support their belief? Many of these people use personal experience to validate what they think and believe. They "know" God exists because they "experienced" him, or things worked out according to their wishes after praying. This is not any different, in my opinion, than those who construct their own spiritual system.

Part of my personal study involved a course called "The Temple of Witchcraft", a series of books by author Christopher Penczak. The series broke up "Wiccan" spirituality (Penczak's version anyway) into five segments: 1. The Inner Temple: meditation and other practices on a personal level; 2. The Outer Temple: ritual and outward expressions of spirituality; 3. Shamanic Temple: incorporating practices of shamanism 4. Temple of High Witchcraft: ceremonial magic, including the Kabbalah; 5. Living Temple: basically leadership in the pagan community. The information was presented in a non-dogmatic way, which I liked, and constantly emphasized that this was just one path among many possible. We traveled to St. Louis and to Colorado to hear Penczak speak and to participate in weekend seminars. I used a lot of his material to organize my thoughts and beliefs into a system that worked well for me, however, I decided against participating in online apprenticeships or further involvement because I didn't want to get involved in another group and I didn't want to lock myself into one particular spiritual worldview.

It was time to get clear on what it was that I actually believed.

My Journey - Part Two

Often, when someone reveals a break with Christianity, those who remain within the Christian fold assume that the one who left is "angry with God". Alternatively, the assumption is that the one who left the church has done so in order to be free of biblical/church restrictions on conduct and behavior. While this may be the case for some, this was not my thinking. And thinking it was, rather than an emotional reaction.

One of the positions that people take as regards to religion or faith that I cannot truly understand is a refusal to consider alternatives. "There's nothing that can shake my faith", or "nothing you can say can talk me out of what I believe". While steadfastness in the face of adversity or persecution is admirable, often it is a refusal or inability to think about what one believes. While many people have thought deeply about their faith and made reasoned decisions about it, I'm not convinced that this represents a majority.  One thing that I have long attempted to do was to question what I believed and considered possible alternatives. My leaving the Catholic Church and embracing the teachings of The Way International was a decision that I made after weighing the evidence. In retrospect I didn't have enough information to accurately form a judgement about what The Way was saying, but at the time it made sense. I wasn't mad at the Church, or the Pope or anyone or anything, I just thought The Way made more sense. Similarly, when I left The Way, I had spent a full year examining what they had been teaching and came to the decision that it no longer made sense to me. Granted, what got me started was immoral and unethical behavior by the leader and chief teacher, but in the end I would have retained the beliefs that I had learned in The Way if they still made sense.

Finally, my decision to no longer consider myself a Christian came after more thought and introspection. Once again, I wasn't mad at anyone, but had come to the conclusion that there was no reason that I could see to view the Bible as having come from God or view it as superior to any other "holy" book. At best it was a collection of books, essays and letters that reflected how various people had viewed God over the years.

Does my tendency to question and my willingness to change make me better than anyone else, or even think that I'm better than anyone else? To quote State Senator Ernie Chambers from last year's dedication of a Humanist/Atheist exhibit at the State Capitol: "It's not my place to tell you that something that gets you through the night is wrong. Everyone is entitled to have whatever beliefs help make them a better person. What is wrong is when we try to legislate some people's opinions for everybody. Then we have a problem." I may be completely wrong about the Biblical God and Christianity. Those who espouse Pascal's Wager might suggest that since I don't know, the safer course would be to believe in the Christian God. But Pascal engaged in a logical fallacy when he formulated his famous wager; it's a false dilemma - there aren't only two choice: believe in God or don't believe in God. There are a multitude of choices: be a Christian and be an atheist are certainly two among them, but there are many choices as to what kind of Christian to be; others choices include be a Muslim, be a Buddhist, be a Pagan, follow Hawaiian huna, venerate the Hindu gods, convert to Asatru and worship the Norse pantheon and on and on. So the wager doesn't really make sense.

When I finally get to the part of my journey since leaving Christianity, it will be evident that I am constantly changing, evolving and looking for more evidence.

Part Three up next!

My Journey - Part One

This journey through my religious beliefs or lack of the same has been posted before, but I thought I'd go through it again...

I grew up in a Catholic family and was pretty religious; I served as an altar boy, went to church every Sunday, prayed a lot, went to confession and thought about God and godliness quite a bit. For a long time I was unaware that there even were other religions. When I started noticing the other churches in our neighborhood I became curious. In Catholic school (which I attended through eighth grade) the view of the Protestant Reformation is skewed toward "rebellion" - these were people who broke off from the "true" church. But at some point my curiosity drove me to investigate some of these other churches, and on the surface their services didn't seem all that different from what I experienced at Catholic mass. But the fact that there were other Christians out there who were just as convinced as we Catholics were  that they had the truth was a seed that would sprout into exploration and examination of other religions.

In high school I started reading about Buddhism and other Eastern religions. Even though I still attended church I wondered, with all the diversity of religion, how I could be sure that I was in the "right" one. I was equally perplexed that no one else seemed as curious as I was.

Someone attempted to give me an answer when I was a freshman in college.

The Way International is a small Christian group that was active in my neighborhood. I was invited to one of their meetings in the apartment of two young guys and was immediately intrigued. They claimed that they could explain the bible like no one ever explained it before, reconcile discrepancies and give proof that Christianity and the Bible were true. Although initially skeptical, this was what I was looking for. If these guys could show me that Christianity and the Bible was "the truth", then I wanted to at least hear what they had to say.

I took a three-week class that they offered and was hooked. One of their main selling points was that they claimed to teach keys to interpreting and understanding the Bible so that anyone could make sense of it without the need for priests and preachers. It made sense to me at the time, even though in retrospect their research was shoddy, their handling of the biblical languages was amateurish and, despite their claims that they would teach us how to interpret for ourselves, disagreeing with the leader just wasn't tolerated. But I latched on to this group and their teachings. Even though their explanations didn't really stand up to scrutiny, no one else had ever tried to make it all fit together before.

Family members were convinced that I was brainwashed, and even considered having me "deprogrammed" at one time. Looking back over the years I reject that explanation, not because I think I was too smart to get brainwashed, but because I made the effort to think outside the box - the box of my childhood religion. I was willing to question and to consider different boxes! Granted, someone a bit more sophisticated in biblical research might have spotted The Way's weak explanations right off, but it was more explanation than I ever received at church.

The problem with The Way was that it was a cult. Now, some people define a cult as any group that teaches heterodoxy, and The Way certainly taught some non-standard views of Christianity, but when I see "cult", I mean a group that is abusive and controlling, irrespective of specific doctrine. I was involved from 1978-1983, and got back involved from 1990-2001, although I maintained a lot of the same beliefs in that seven-year gap. I ended my involvement when I started questioning what The Way was teaching.

The leader of The Way had stepped down after a sexual scandal. This caused me to wonder whether what he had been teaching was to be trusted, so I started examining everything he had taught, using The Way's own methodology for interpreting the Bible. I came up with a lot of problems. The foundational class that this new leader had been teaching deviated in some respects from what the founding leader had taught. The rationale and Biblical basis for most of these new teachings was pretty shaky. This caused me to go back and examine doctrine from before this leader had taken over, all the way back to the fundamentals, and being a little more discerning than my 19 year old self, I saw more problems than I could count. I brought my concerns to the leaders of The Way, but received no answers beyond "trust your leaders, they know what they're doing". Eventually my questioning got me kicked out of the organization.

Even though I was questioning much of what The Way had taught, I still retained faith that the methodology, the "keys to research" were sound, and that they could be utilized to arrive at the truth.

A few years before, after the death of the founding leader, there had been a schism in the ranks and many offshoots, run by former Way people had sprung up. They all used the same research keys as the original group, but, freed from the influence of central control, they all came up with different answers. My conclusion was that maybe the Bible isn't as easy to interpret as I'd been led to believe if the same study methods led to such diverse results. I took this one step further and considered, not just the many Way offshoots, but the multitude of Christian denominations, some with minor differences, some barely recognizable as being Christian, all different. I decided that anyone who thought that they had "The Truth" based on a reading of the Bible was fooling themselves. Multitudes of people had read the Bible and claimed to divine God's will from its pages, but why did they come up with so many different answers?

So, where did people get their beliefs about what they believed about God? About Jesus? From the Bible. Why did they believe that there is a God? Yes, many people claim personal visions, or feelings, that they interpret as being from the God of the Bible. I contend that without the framework and presuppositions that the Bible and its attendant religions provide, none of these personal experiences would be interpreted as from a God that they previously hadn't known about. Logically, in order to have any opinion about God that is not entirely subjective, you have to go back to the Bible.

But if I couldn't be sure about the Bible, on what basis did I continue to believe that there was a Supreme Being, Creator of the Universe? There was none. Up until then, I had accepted that premise, but no longer felt that I had any evidence that that premise was true.

So, on that day I decided to stop believing in the God of the Bible.

Many ex-Way people joined Way offshoots and continued believing the same things that they always had, just in a different organization. Some went back to their family religion. Some got involved in evangelical or fundamentalist churches. Some became atheists. At this point I was not ready to abandon belief in the supernatural, and thought that one spiritual belief was as good as another. After a couple of years of reading and talking to people with different worldviews I began identifying as a pagan. My journey from a neophyte to where I am today is another post.

Manager Part XI - Training

How do you get your subordinates out of Levels 1 and 2 and become more self directed?

(Refer to Part X http://aesduir.blogspot.com/2017/07/managers-part-x-minimizing-subordinate.html)

As a manager you can't just show up to work and expect that your subordinates will automatically aspire to Level 4 or 5 independence. You have to actually train them! And once you've trained them, you have to follow up in order to assure yourself that your subordinates really know what they're doing. Just telling a subordinate that you expect them to work independently and make their own decisions doesn't mean that they will. (And we're talking here about ability and understanding, insubordination is a completely different subject). And even after a subordinate has been instructed in the expectations of the job, doesn't mean that they have been trained. And even after you are sure that they fully understand all aspects of the job and have the ability to carry them out, being fully trained means that they are actually doing it. If you don't follow up and ensure that the work is being done you run the risk of your subordinate deciding on his own what his job should be, and that might be very different than what you expect!

Back when I managed grocery stores we had a position called Grocery Clerk. This was an entry-level position and was almost always filled by high school kids who had never held a job before. The clerks had two main jobs: retrieve carts from the parking lot and "pull cardboard". They had other duties as well, but those are the two main ones. Pulling cardboard involved methodically going through an aisle, section by section, and removing any cardboard boxes that were less than half full and then "facing", pulling all the product forward on the shelf. (This was what was called a "warehouse" store, most product was put on the shelf in the case that in came in, with the front and top cut off.) The purpose of this was to keep the shelves orderly and make it easy for the customers to see the products. Something called a "cardboard bin", a wheeled, plastic container, 4'x4'x4' was utilized to throw the cardboard in. This was mind-numbingly, boring work, but it had to be done. It was also extremely simple to master, but it was almost never done correctly.

The problem was training. What should have been done was that each new grocery clerk be teamed up with a manager for half of a shift, released for a few hours to work on his own, and then back with the manager for follow up. For the first few weeks the clerk's work should have been checked by a manager until it was assured that proper training had taken place. What did happen was that the new clerk was teamed up with an "experienced" clerk who probably was doing things incorrectly himself, ensuring that the cycle of incompetence would continue. Look in on most grocery clerks allegedly pulling cardboard and you'll see two of them strolling down an aisle, chatting (grocery clerks are almost never to be working two-by-two, pulling cardboard is a one-person job), pulling the occasional box off the shelf, without a cardboard bin, then strolling to the back room to throw out the small amount of cardboard that they can hold in their arms. And there is rarely, if ever, a manager checking up on them.

A few years ago I conducted an experiment. I watched as a grocery clerk exited an aisle that he had supposedly just got done pulling cardboard in. (He had a cardboard bin). I entered the same aisle and pulled cardboard and faced the correct way. I piled all the cardboard on the floor in front of each section and then called him back to show him what he had missed. He was not happy, but he did learn what was expected of him.

Sometimes the lesson people get from the Five Levels of Management Freedom is that everybody should be at Level 4 or 5 and that Managers are just supposed to sit back and watch everyone work. (Presumably with their feet up on their desks). That is the wrong lesson! Getting everyone to at least Level 3 and ideally Levels 4 and 5 is the goal; but how do you accomplish that goal? Not by wishful thinking or by simply telling people to manage themselves, but by putting in the hard work of training subordinates to be not just "hard workers", but independent thinkers and problem solvers.

Training can be very time-consuming, but the result is worth the time.

Religious Work-Arounds

I just finished reading an article about a New Jersey town attempting to prevent local Jews from extending their eruv.  What's an eruv you ask?  To answer that question you have to go back to Talmudic and Rabbinic law which interprets the laws and strictures in the Torah. The principle in the Torah is that the Sabbath is a day of rest and that no work is to be done on it. That sounds pretty simple, but people being people, they needed clarification, they needed a definition of what "work" included. There are thousands of words written delineating what work is, but what is relevant here is the section that defines "carrying any object from a private place (like your home) to a public place" (like the grocery store or even the synagogue) as work. "Objects" are further defined as anything other than the clothes on your back, including your house keys, pushing a baby stroller or even an umbrella. Obviously this would cause problems if strictly adhered to. A "solution" had to be found; and by "solution" I mean a way to technically observe the rule while simultaneously getting around it. This work-around involved attaching some physical extension to the home that enlarged what would be considered the "private" space. In earlier times Jews tended to be segregated from the Christians and the walls of their ghetto served to separate what was inside (private) from what was outside (public). In modern times the extension usually takes the form of wires attached to utility poles, enclosing the neighborhood, or in some cases a whole municipality. So what you have is a fairly simple commandment: "Rest, i.e. do no work", that has been complicated beyond belief, but rather than admit that the rules are ridiculous, and say "we're just not going to do it", ways to get around the rules while technically obeying them are devised. Orthodox Jews can still claim to follow The Law, while being able to circumvent it in order to live their modern lives.

Lest you think it's just those crazy Jews who do things like this, I was involved in a Christian fringe group a few years ago that interpreted a verse that said "Owe no man any thing, only to love" as a prohibition against any kind of debt. While not as labyrinthine as the Talmudic rules, this organization, The Way International, had all kinds of rules about what was debt and what was not, but were very firm about prohibiting their members from having bank loans. This obviously would cause a problem  for anyone wanting to buy a home, since it is unlikely that anyone other than the very wealthy would have enough cash on hand to buy a home without securing a loan. What some Way people did was convince a non-Way family member to buy the home and sell it to the Way family member in some complicated deal that they convinced themselves wasn't debt. I never understood this maneuver, since you were still in debt, just not to a bank. The most creative debt avoidance move that I saw involved a guy who was buying his home from his parents a little at a time. Rather than call it a loan, he called it partial ownership. If he paid them $10,000 on a $100,000 home, then he owned 10% and they owned 90%. If he paid an additional $20,000, he now owned 30% and so on. He peddled this theory to Way leadership, but we never found out how well it worked since his parents died in a car crash and he inherited the home outright.

Finally, there's the example of the annulment. Some churches are against divorce and even consider it adultery if a divorced person remarries. But there is a loophole, the annulment.  A marriage that is annulled is treated as if it never existed. While I can imagine circumstances where a church might want to make an exception to their no-divorce rule, (e.g. underage bride or groom, diminished capacity, human trafficking) I know personally of situations where an annulment was sought and granted simply to recognize a divorce and get the couple back into the church's good graces. We don't believe in divorce but we'll grant you this divorce as long as we don't call it a divorce.

What are we to make of all this? These are just a few examples that have popped up in my news feed or in conversations recently. I think that in general people like to talk the talk and put their holy books and pronouncements by holy men up on pedestals, but when it gets in the way of what they really want to do, or if it becomes inconvenient, they still want to talk the talk without walking the walk.

Lughnasadh 2017

As a modern pagan I've always made a habit of changing my spiritual outlook as circumstances change, my point of view changes, and as I see that certain things don't "work" or don't fit into reality as I observe it. I meditate and do shamanic journeying, but have come to the conclusion that it doesn't matter if what I "see" during times of altered consciousness is objectively real or "just" exists in my mind. Are the gods objectively real, or just expressions of greater truth? Who cares? How about magic? If doing a ritual helps me focus so that I can mundanely bring my will to pass, what difference does it make if it's supernatural or not?

One of the things that I'm relatively faithful at doing as part of my pagan spiritual practice is spending some time in "the woods", i.e. Wilderness Park at every one of the sabbats.  Today was Lughnasadh, the "cross quarter" day approximately halfway between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox. There's a variety of ways that modern pagans view this sabbat, one, which I subscribe to, connects it to the first harvests. It's a time when plans begin to come to fruition. If you compare the Wheel of the Year to a person's life, with either Samhain or Yule as the beginning and end, Lughnasadh is about where I am now, about ¾ of the way through a typical lifespan. And wouldn't you know it - in a lot of ways things are coming together pretty well. I live a stable, yet fulfilling life, with a great wife and pretty cool adult kids; I have a job that is challenging yet not stressful, I make a difference in people's lives a wedding minister and I am beginning to get recognition for my main creative outlet: photography. As Lughnasadh marks a time in the year where the time of planting and growth is mostly past, but there is still plenty of time to reap and to enjoy the fruits of labor, so I stand at a similar point in the Wheel of Life.

This is one of the reasons why I do these nature walks on the sabbats - I get insight into life and living. This year was no exception.

Bitter?

Before I start in, let me make clear that I have no problem with people who pray for things. I don't think that they're stupid or deluded, I just don't agree with them that it's effective. I don't particularly want people praying for me, and if they do, I don't want to hear about it, especially if they're praying for me to "see the light" or similar. Usually when I see people ask for prayer for themselves or others I keep my mouth shut and don't comment, it's not my place to try & dissuade them and the timing would usually be terrible! That all being said, it's been my observation that people who pray to get healed fail to get healed as often as they do get healed. When someone recovers, then "praise God!", but when they fail to recover it's either ignored or chalked up to something along the lines of God's "mysterious ways", or ultimate plan. But that's all hypothetical, let's move on to a specific example, as illustrated by the Facebook thread to the left.

Granted, I knew that I was starting trouble with my comment, but the person who was healing in this instance, unless he has changed greatly in the last year and a half, is not religious and was probably not praising God for the fact that his injury was healing. (The person making the initial comment is not the person who was injured). So I thought that I was on safe ground making a comment. Notice that, although one might easily infer that I was disagreeing with or contradicting the God praiser, my actual words merely added a group who merited some praise. (Not to mention the fact that our bodies naturally heal from minor injuries with or without prayer) I was then asked who "gave" the medical professionals their expertise. Even if one believes that there is power in prayer, surely my answer was logical, rational and fact-based...with no name-calling! But it's the response to that which really got my attention:

"Tom you seem bitter"

Bitter? I received no response to a request for an explanation of this characterization, other than that Jesus could heal "that". Now there might be areas where a case might be made for some bitterness in my life, likely harbor some toward my first wife for various reasons, and haven't quite put aside my attitude toward my former employer, but bitter...towards...what? Who? This seems to be a go-to response from some theists toward atheists, agnostics, skeptics and followers of other religions. There's an accusation that we're bitter towards God, or mad at God, or we hate God. I can't speak for a single person other than myself, but I arrived at my current worldview not because I was mad at any god or gods, but simply because it just didn't make sense to me any longer. If there is such a thing as "God", I don't see any evidence that he, she or it operates the way people think. 

So folks, pray all that you want, but not everyone else does, and it's not because we're bitter.