Sunday, May 1, 2022

Managers - Post Pandemic #3 - What Does a Manager Do?

So what does a manager do? To most people, a manager is just a higher-paid, busier version of the people he or she manages, who also bosses people around. What just what is a manager supposed to manage? According to Bill Oncken Jr., whose book Managing Management Time is one of the most detailed, practical management guide that I have ever seen, a manager is someone who, in contrast to someone who does things, a manager is someone gets things done How does a manager get things done? Allowing for the fact that some people with the title "manager" don't supervise anyone, but oversee processes, managers get things done by way of other peopleHow the professional manager utilizes others to get things done consists largely in how his or her time is spent.

There are broadly three categories of time: boss-imposed, system-imposed, and self-imposed. This is true for everyone who has a job, not just managers. As we progress, you'll see that time can also be divided in other ways, some that overlap with the three categories listed here. 

  • Boss-imposed time is pretty easy to explain - it's the time you spend doing things that your immediate supervisor tells you to do. 
  • System-imposed time is time that you spend dealing with the administrative tasks - paperwork, tracking, answering emails. The amount of system-imposed time varies from industry to industry and flourishes when there active factions within a company all vying for control and influence. 
  • Self-imposed time is a little harder to pin down. It's not playing hooky from work and going fishing or playing golf, it's not deciding to spend your work day with your feet up on the desk. What it is, is time that you spend conducting your business as you see fit, free from the constraints of the system or the orders of your boss. It's the time you spend planning, the time you spend coaching your subordinates and anticipating and solving problems that haven't occurred yet. 
In a perfect world, your boss- and system-imposed time will be minimized and your self-imposed time will be maximized. But how do you do that? We'll look at the boss and the system in a later post, but first let's look at a group of people who aren't really part of the three categories of time: subordinates.

In theory, there is no such thing as subordinate-imposed time. In any organizational chart that you're likely to see the big boss is on top, medium and little bosses are under him, front line supervisors are father down and the workers are on the bottom. There is no organizational chart in the world where the subordinates, again, in theory, can tell the boss what to do, or make demands on his time. The fertilizer flows downhill! So, if you are allowing your subordinates to determine how your time is to be spent, then you are exercising some self-imposed time by willingly upending that org chart. (This is not to say that lower-level managers and workers are without worth - later on we'll talk about how to manage your manager). You are letting yourself be managed, reversing the roles and eating up your self-imposed time.

More detail on this in a later article, but the key to eliminating subordinate-imposed time is to delegate. Let me point out that delegating and assigning are two different things. Assigning is when I give you a task, perhaps even tell you how and when to do it. Delegating is when I give you responsibility and authority for a certain aspect of your job and hold you accountable for getting it done. Certainly training and coaching is involved, but someone to whom responsibility is delegated does not wait to be told what to do, or how or when to do it. Someone who has tasks assigned, goes from one duty to the next, and is at a loss when the list of jobs runs out.

In this new era of employee empowerment, perception has become very important, as has communication. Employees have always been susceptible to viewing a manager's job to be nothing more than just "bossing me around" and the sign of a manager doing "real work" is doing the same work that the subordinates do. A post-pandemic manager has to be an expert communicator. And what do they need to communicate? That being the recipient of delegated responsibility is not a burden, but an opportunity. That there are tasks that a manager is responsible for that are equally as important as stocking the shelves or making that sales call and that if the manager is busy 40 hours a week doing the work that is in someone else's job description, than those manager-specific tasks are not getting done. Or are getting done during days off or unpaid overtime. 

When I was a retail manager there were numerous responsibilities that I had, that were different than what the front line stockers, cooks, bakers, meat cutter et al were involved in.

  • Creating a budget
  • Ordering
  • Negotiating with suppliers
  • Scheduling
  • Paying bills
  • Hiring
  • Training
  • Arranging for repair and maintenance of equipment
  • Certification for Liquor License, Forklift Operator, Food Service Manager et al
  • Create sales plans
  • Organize sales events
  • Sales and Labor projections
  • Respond to customer complaints
  • Fend off micromanaging by corporate!
  • Meetings!
I'm sure I'm missing some. I recall returning from vacation once and the store assistant manager commenting on how I had a lot to keep track of. I'm sure there are similar lists in other industries. Unless some of the daily tasks of running a business are delegated, one manager can't do it all, and certainly can't do it all if he is spending his time cleaning the bathroom or stocking cans of beans. 

At one time in my life I managed a retail store. When I left for the day, I entrusted the operation of the store to an "evening supervisor". Once I had fully trained this person and clearly communicated my expectations, I allowed him to manage his time as he saw fit, as long as the standards that I had set had been met. My immediate supervisor however, insisted that I provide my evening supervisor with a list of things to do every night. Not only that, but I had to let him inspect this list at any time to prove that I had created it, complete with check-marks indicating that my supervisor had completed the list. And I couldn't just hand out a generic list every night - no - it had to be a brand-new, fresh list every night. My boss-imposed time increased and forced me to burden my subordinate with some boss-imposed time as well. Nobody won.

But there is a way to minimize, or even eliminate, subordinate-imposed time...stay tuned.
 

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XXIX - Sex, Cults and Rock & Roll

Before I was branded as a failure by Way leadership, I was being groomed for bigger and better things. At the time, Nebraska has a fairly healthy Way presence. Not as numerically entrenched as New York, but a branch of seven twig fellowships was well established. I was given the position of Assistant Twig Coordinator for the group that met at our home, mentored directly by Carol D., a Way Corps graduate. Within a short period of time we had gathered enough people to run our own Power For Abundant Living (PFAL) Class. I was appointed co-coordinator of the class with Mary H, a Way Corps student who was on Leave of Absence (LOA) Status due to missing tuition payments. (This was fairly common; most people who were released from the Way Corps were kicked out for financial reasons; it was rare indeed for someone to be separated or even have their application rejected, for any other reason). It was a heady time. My performance as Class Coordinator was a success, and I was (I thought) on the fast track to leadership. After a few months, Ronnie S, our state coordinator, had the brilliant idea that we should split most twigs into two. This was supposedly because our numbers had grown so fast and the added centers would cause our numbers to grow exponentially. I found out much later, that this was merely a ploy to exaggerate Ronnie's success at outreach. He spun off a portion of the branch into a "twig area" (basically a mini-branch) led by Carol D, the Way Corps grad, when new leadership came in the following year, it quickly became apparent that most of these fellowship exited only on paper. One of the splits was my own fellowship. Four of us, me, my roommate Tim, Pat N, a single mother of two boys and Beth, and brand-new PFAL grad, were to form the new twig, meeting in Pat N's home in a trailer court on the west side of Lincoln. I was terrified of the new responsibility. I had been a Twig Coordinator before, in New York, but then I had inherited a large, vibrant, functioning group, here I was put in charge of three other people and expected to shepherd the growth myself. At first it went pretty well. Next door to Pat there was another single mom with two teenage boys, living with her mother. We signed all four up for the next PFAL class, basically doubling our group size. Carol's twig provided another four people and we ran our second PFAL class, again with me running the show. 

Here's where I'm going to divert a bit from my own personal story and talk about The Way's attitude toward sex. At the very least, it was confusing. They didn't frown on pre-marital sex. Weirdly though, they did frown on unmarried couples living together. To clarify, people who were strictly roommates, like in WOW or Way Home situations, was okay, but if you were "a couple" and presumably having sex, that was referred to as "shacking up" or "playing house" and was strongly discouraged. I am aware of several instances where a couple was living together, but in order to get married in a Way ceremony, they had to make separate living arrangements until the wedding. This is something that I will get into in more depth in later installments, but in the higher echelons of Way leadership, infidelity was rampant and quietly encouraged, and sexual abuse was not unheard of. Although how much this filtered down to the lower levels depended a lot on the personality of the local leadership, their own views of sex and how much control they could hold over you using sex. Ronnie S, our local head honcho appeared somewhat morally conservative; although there was a lot of extramarital sex going on among the younger Way adherents he either didn't know it was going on, or only chose to address it if he could use it to exert influence over you. 

There hadn't been many opportunities for sex while I was a WOW. I personally steered away from romantic or sexual relationships with roommates for the same reasons that workplace romances are often a bad idea - once they end, that person is still right there, every day. And there just weren't that many other options, especially since we were being actively persecuted in Sidney! When I arrived in Lincoln, with many choices for pairing off with young, attractive and most important to a cult member, like minded women, I was, to put it politely, rarin' to go. But, back to the leadership arc. 

Not long after I was given the responsibility of running a new twig fellowship, I was moved from one Way Home to another across town, and made Way Home Coordinator. This was a bit odd, since there was a twig fellowship running out of the new Way Home and I wasn't going to run it - I was still the coordinator of the group at Pat's house. My new residence was definitely not within walking distance of the location of the fellowship I was coordinating, and I didn't have a car. I borrowed my new roommate's motorcycle on occasion, but due to the distance, I spent more time over at Pat's house than at my own home. Mike and Rosemarie (the same Rosemarie from Sidney and Kearney) and their twig coordinator Mary did their thing and I did mine. This move took place in February. It was around late April or May when I was informed that due to my not meeting financial obligations I would not be entering the Way Corps. Also around this time, the four people that we had signed up for and graduated from PFAL decided that they no longer wanted to be involved in The Way. Leadership, as I had stated in the previous chapter, had decided that I was a failure. My fellowship was dissolved, and I no longer had any leadership position. Around this time, it came to the attention of Ronnie S that I had been involved in a relationship with Pat N. Everything that had gone "wrong" was blamed on this relationship, and things going "wrong" was presented as evidence that the relationship was the cause. The last thing that was important to me in Wayworld, an assignment to do a teaching on American history at a Way July Fourth celebration, was taken away from me. 

Seeing that my future as an up and coming Way leader wasn't going to happen, Pat and I decided that we should get married. Ronnie refused to officiate the ceremony and we got married by a judge at the County-City Building. We were still part of The Way, and still participated, but we were "tainted" and were really only tolerated. The owner of the Way Home I lived in was a Way person who lived out of state. I got her permission to continue living there after Pat and I got married, which Ronnie was furious about, since he had already assigned a new bunch of Way Home people there. But Ronnie was reassigned that August and a new state leader came in. 

Then I got fired from my job and ended up four months behind on my rent. 

You would think that a Christian community would support one of their own when bad times hit. But the way The Way viewed things was that bad things happened due to your lack of "believing" - so it was my fault, evidence of some spiritual malady that was causing my problems. Instead of help, I received lectures until one day I lost my temper at the new leader's wife and we didn't attend another Way function for seven years. We moved out of the home that we rented from a Way person and moved on with our lives.

Except we didn't. 

Despite not being actively involved in The Way, Waybrain was still very strong with us. We had internalized many of the cultish assumptions and ended up back in their arms in 1990, finding a Way that, if possible, had become even more cultish.

Start from the beginning

Part XXX


So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XXVIII - Apprentice Way Corps

I've lived in Lincoln Nebraska since August 1981, 41 years as of when I am writing this blog post. I'm often asked why I moved from New York to Nebraska and I usually lie. Back when I was actively involved in The Way I would say that I was sent here as part of a missionary program, people understood that. After I left, more often than not I would tell people that I travelled around a lot in my youth and settled down in Lincoln when I met my first wife and started a family. Sometimes I would say that I was in a cult. It all depended on who I was talking to and whether I felt they really wanted to know or were just making conversation. After my divorce I shied away from a relationship with a woman whom I liked a lot and thought I had a lot in common with because she couldn't understand how I had "been so stupid" to get involved in a cult. 

Towards the end of my year long commitment to participate in the WOW Ambassador program I made two decisions that in retrospect were idiotic decisions. Despite the utter mess that my year as a WOW had been, I (1) Decided to apply to entry into the Way Corps and (2) Sign up for a year to live in a Way Home, an in-state program overseen by The Way's Limb (aka state) Coordinator. The Way Corps was the supposed leadership training program. The trend had been for virtually every level of Way leadership to be trained in The Way Corps, rather than rising up organically in the community. At the time, Way Corps training was a four year process. The first year, called the Apprentice Year, took place wherever you happened to live. You were encouraged to take on leadership roles: running twig fellowships, coordinating classes, and being active in local Way events. You were also expected to get your tuition together, either by saving it yourself, or, as was quite common, getting "sponsorships" (later called "spiritual partners") to help defray the costs. (more on that later) The Way Home program was similar to the WOW program with a few exceptions: you could work full time if desired, you were not prohibited from leaving your assigned area, and your witnessing time was up to you. Other than that, you were at the beck and call of the Way leadership and were expected to put the needs of The Way before your own. 

The Way Home where I lived for the first half of the Way year (August-February) was in a older neighborhood. It was a three bedroom home with a finished basement. The basement had another bedroom, a family room and a laundry room. My roommates were Carol, 28 years old and a graduate of the Way Corps; Tim and Joan, both early twenties, and both had been a WOW the previous year and were Apprentice Corps as I was; and Lisa, a senior in high school. I was assigned to be the Assistant Twig Coordinator to Carol for the fellowship that met in our home. My last job in Kearney had been at a Country Kitchen restaurant; my manager in Kearney got me a job at the Lincoln Country Kitchen, so I had a job right away. 

Let's return to the topic of Way Corps tuition. In retrospect it seems ridiculously low. If I remember correctly, it was $4,000 per each year "in residence", the second and fourth years when you were at a Way property actively be "trained". $1,000 was due around 6 months before you started "in residence", the rest due at intervals during the year. But I looked up an inflation calculator online and saw that the purchasing power of a 1982 (the year I would have started training) dollar is around 3 times what it is now, so in current dollars the tuition would have been around $12,000 per year. I have no idea if the tuition increased in subsequent years. To put the do-ability of coming up with this in perspective, the first full-time job I had in 1982 paid around $13,000 a year. I was tithing to The Way, so subtract $1,300 and you've got $11,700. The tuition of $4,000 would have been 34% of a typical annual wage for a non-skilled, non-professional job in those days, and most of us Way Corps candidates were in our early twenties, not college graduates and a lot of us were working part-time jobs. I have no idea if this was a reasonable amount for room and board, as well as the purported training, but it certainly was outside the realm of possibility for the typical Way kid. So the solution was sponsorships/spiritual partners. 

Sponsors would committed to contributing a set amount every month to help a Way Corps person defray the tuition costs. Some candidates had well-off friends or relatives who supported their commitment to The Way and contributed all or most of the tuition up front. Most of us had to spend time begging for money. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you take the long view) my relatives were definitely not supporting my involvement in The Way and most of my Way friends were in the same financial boat that I was. The end result was that when the first installment was due, I was a long way from $1,000 and was removed from Apprentice Corps status. 

I felt like a failure.

I was told that I was a failure.

But there's a lot more to tell about the year from August 1981 to August 1982, which I will talk about in Part XXIX.

Start from the beginning

Part XXIX