Archive: August, 2006

When we are children and young adults, parents and teachers are our mentors, helping to shape our abilities and our approaches to life. As adults in the working world, however, not many of us are fortunate enough to find mentors who can guide us in the same way.

I was so fortunate. Not the first time out though. In my first job out of college, I worked for a woman who made horses whinny at the sound of her name. She was a horrid tyrant of a person with absolutely no people or management skills who had been promoted because of seniority alone.

Fortunately, before I could get completely disillusioned, two years later I was lucky enough to go to work for the dream boss. I’ll call her Linda. What made Linda the dream boss? Was she completely apathetic when it came to my working hours? Nope, she was very understanding in emergencies but smart enough not to let you take advantage of that.

Did she shower me with compliments and raises? Nope, although in group meetings with executives, she would never take credit for a win. She always named the person in her group who was most instrumental in making the win happen. She never praised falsely but she was uncanny at uncovering individual strengths in our team members and bringing them to light.

Did she imbue a leisurely pace? No, she was one of the most driven people I’d ever met but she made me want to follow her lead. I wanted to live up to the standards she imposed on herself. Because she made it very clear that my efforts made a difference, I was always eager to take on new challenges. And she was always generous enough to delegate those challenges out of her own management duties. Before I knew it, I was groomed and ready to manage my own team.

She made our team feel that anything we did to make projects succeed was making our team succeed, and in turn, making the company better. It was never about just furthering individual careers.

She listened, really listened, to our concerns and complaints. Sometimes she would point out the error in our thinking but the rest of the time, if she thought the complaint was valid, she would carry it up to the next level and see what could be done about it.

The ability to effectively manage people is a talent, a gift. But sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can improve your own abilities from watching it in action.

Everyone knows a know-it-all. And if you know only one, then consider yourself blessed. The know-it-all is the guy who, after you tell him what you paid for a new lawn mower, tells you he saw one for a lot cheaper. It’s the woman who takes particular joy in pointing out the small typo in the report on which you worked frantically to meet an early deadline. They are those people who, wrapped in the luxury of hindsight, feel compelled to point out how you could have done things differently.

Don’t get me wrong. Constructive criticism is invaluable. The problem is that this kind of criticism is not constructive. You can’t turn back the hands of time to retype that report so why point out the typo? Perhaps the most egregious example of this I ever encountered was a guy at one company I worked for whose job it was to compile a report of all the mistakes he found in our newsletters each month after they were printed and mailed to subscribers. In one, he pointed out an article that was in the Time Roman font but seemed to have “a Helvetica space” between two words. I mean, come on. A) Who cares? and B) What are the chances of that particular error ever occurring again in the history of mankind? It did no good to point it out.

I once knew an executive who loved to assign small projects to people and not give them any details of what he wanted. It was only after you did your best and presented the end product that he tore it apart, making you start over from square one. It wasn’t that what you did wasn’t good, it just wasn’t what he wanted. And he chose not to tell you what he wanted until the deal was done. This gave his ego some kind of boost I guess. What he didn’t realize is that anyone can find fault with anything if it is their sole intention to do so. If you have no idea of the work and complexity that went into something, you can very easily fly in kamikaze-style and just defecate all over everything. The real sign of maturity and character is if you can resist the urge to do so when nothing can be changed anyway.

Know-it-alls can be very negative. Their mantra is “That won’t work.” It’s the person who doesn’t have much to do with a company-wide project while it is being developed, but is ever so happy to point out the failures once it’s rolled out. (I’ve been told that the word for this is schadenfreude—meaning to get enjoyment from the troubles of others. However, I can never remember how to pronounce it. I keep wanting to say Schenectady–the city in New York. But I digress.)

What draws these people to smug superiority? I’ve been told that behind all such self-aggrandizing and fault-finding is low self-esteem. Somehow people with inferiority complexes don’t feel as threatened if they can point out the shortcomings of others. For that reason, I’ve tried to be understanding. I figure if it affords their fragile egos some measure of balm, then I can turn the other cheek.

But it can get really tiresome. And I’m not quite sure of the reaction these people are expecting, either. Do they think that at some executive meeting in the future, the CEO will say, “You know, Harold down in data entry always seems to find the holes in our end-products. What say we run this multi-million dollar merger deal by him first?” Well, that’s not going to happen. And no one is going to be rushing down to Harold’s cubicle to get his first reactions if those reactions are always bad. He won’t get a reputation for being savvy. He will get a reputation for being negative and annoying.

Have you learned how to deal effectively with a know-it-all? Perhaps you yourself know it all and would like to defend your position. Let’s hear from both!

TechRepublic member TechGirl recently rattled a stick in my cage by alerting me to an article on Digg that questioned the accomplishments of a well-regarded woman in IT (who works for Lunarpages.com) because she happens to be attractive. That piece then started a new debate over at Webhostingtalk.com – about women in IT. In that debate, a guy named JHServers felt it necessary to express his personal opinion about the suitability of women in high-end management. Here’s part of what he said:

“I personally don’t think women are fit for such high end management in the corporate world. Not because of their intelligence or inabilities. I believe they are 100% equal in that respect to men. However, I do not like how women can become irrational and have “that time of the month” and how women become emotional over things. There are exceptions of course, but not the majority. Men are more cutt throat and ruthless which is necessary to run a successful business in an ever-increasingly competitive global economy.”

TechGirl suggested that I might want to address his comments in a blog. She was right. He’s what I would say to JHServers.

Hi JH! I must say this is pretty exciting for me because I’ve never met a time-traveler before. It’s great here in the 21st century and all, but it’s kind of neat to read a blog posting from someone who resides in a past decade. So, how are things in the ’50s? Is your Studebaker holding up OK? Please say hello to Lucy for me. She sure gets herself into some crazy situations, doesn’t she?

Now, having said that, let me ask you this: What the hell is wrong with you? You really believe that a woman’s hormones can make her too emotional to be in “high-end management”? Excuse me, but have you met Mr. Testosterone? The overabundance of that little hormone in a few select people has been the suspected root of more wars and fights and assaults than all the Midol pills in the world combined.

My dear man, you can’t classify gender differences into your cut-rate DNA-by-numbers scheme simply because that girl at the Starbucks you tried to hit on yesterday flipped you the bird. (My guess is tweren’t hormones what done that.)

You have to know that there have been great female leaders in the history of the world. Right? Hello? Admittedly, many of the best-known female leaders may have come to prominence in the two or three decades since your disproportionately small head has been buried in the sand, but they’re out there. Do the names Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, or Golda Meir ring a bell? Somehow I can’t picture Golda Meir postponing the business of Israel because she was retaining water.

You say at one point in your post that you personally don’t think women are fit for high-end management in the corporate world, but “Not because of their intelligence or inabilities. I believe they are 100% equal in that respect to men.” [Writer's note: Smacking my forehead here.] So you’re saying that women have just as many inabilities as men? Does that mean that neither should be leaders? Are you advocating members of another species for high-end management, like maybe Golden Retrievers or spider monkeys? I’m just saying.

And let me address your blanket statement that women aren’t cutthroat enough to run a business. Have you ever met a high-school girl? Believe me, I’d just as soon go 10 gloveless rounds in a ring with Mike Tyson than ever again have to endure another conversation with my high school nemesis, Sherry “Adolf” Bohannon.

In your sweeping generalization, you even manage to insult your own gender. You say, “The majority of male IT workers are socially inept when it comes to women.” Again with the categorizing. How nice and tidy it must be in your world. I shudder to think what your views on race are.

I sincerely hope for your sake that you’re not in business for yourself because it’s going to be a long, tough road for you with that attitude.

Give President Eisenhower my best.

Have any of you ever worked in a virtual hell hole? Early in my career, I worked for a small publishing business that specialized in magazines that covered computer technology. I look back on those few months and wonder how I survived. This will all sound too bad to be true, but I’m not making it up.

First, the boss. Because of his complete lack of business finesse and talent, I can only surmise that there was a lot of money in the family tree that financed this endeavor. While the rest of us worked in postage-stamp sized cubicles, against walls with windows that were so cheaply made you could hear the wind whistling through them, he operated from an office that you could fit 10 SUVs in. He had this huge Citizen Kane type desk on one side and a hot tub on the other. Yes, a hot tub. And he had a different telephone extension for each location. I don’t know if he answered, “Hello from the hot tub!” because I never called him, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I actually only saw him twice in my tenure there. Once when I was introduced to him in his ego-fitted office and once when he walked through the staff area waving around a foot-long summer sausage and making lewd comments. He was a pig of gargantuan proportions.

I worked at this company for a short time in the dead of winter. The aforementioned windows often had frost on the inside. I was constantly drinking coffee and hot tea, but only in self-defense against freezing solid at my desk.

My immediate supervisor was a chain-smoking hermit who emerged from his office only once a day. An added bonus–his girlfriend worked on the floor below and every now and then she would come by and glare at me for no apparent reason. The real “bonus” was that my supervisor was a micromanager of the highest degree and never actually gave me anything to do. So I sat there day after day, fighting boredom and frostbite. Of course, the array of strange people who worked there–including a guy who scratched himself constantly–kept me reasonably alert and from lapsing into a glaciated coma.

The day I got another job offer and was able to shout a bit “Buh BYE!” was the happiest day of my life. To add to my happiness, after I announced my imminent departure, one of my soon-to-be-ex-coworkers happened to mention that my supervisor had once served time in prison for a violent crime. Now if anyone can top that, let’s hear it.

We’ve all been there. You’re complaining to your parents about something and they come out with some horrendous story about when they were young.

“When I was young, I had to walk to school barefoot through three feet of snow carrying a thousand pounds of firewood on my back while rabid wolverines nipped at my elbows” or “When I was young, we didn’t have houses. We slept in hollowed-out tree trunks.”

This tactic NEVER works. But I’ve discovered an interesting phenomenon with my own son, who is now a teenager (aka a complete stranger who would not claim to know me if he were drowning and I was the only person on shore with a life preserver.)

Technology is the key. If you want to drive some hard-luck stories home with your kids, if you really want them to know how deprived and empty your childhood was, talk about the technology you didn’t have. They’ll want to organize a telethon for you!

If parents and grandparents start off with “In my day, we didn’t have MySpace…” then you’ll get the kids’ attention. But be careful, you don’t want to break their hearts. One time I told my son that when I was a kid we only had three television channels and he teared up.

Now there is a fine line between garnering sympathy and garnering ridicule. When your son is whining about some new accessory he needs for his iPod, it really won’t help to drag out the boom box or 8-track cassette player that you used to listen to. He will just laugh. A lot. You will be the Fred Flintstone to his George Jetson.

And while technology deficits can work for you, you don’t want to go too far and come across like a Shaker. When my son was five, he asked me if they had music when I was a kid. I told him we had the occasional Gregorian Chant. (Tip: Sarcasm does not work on five-year-olds.)

With the fabulous rate that new technology happens, who can say what our kids’ kids will have access to? Maybe opening a file on the desktop will simply involve blinking one’s eyes. Then your kids will be telling their kids, “In my day, we had to double-click those icons.” Let the sympathy begin.

TechRepublic ran an article about the 10 grammar mistakes that make you look stupid. The examples cited involved the misuse of words in written and verbal communications. I’d like to go a step farther here and talk about words that may be used correctly but are pronounced wrong. They also may be much more flagrant examples of stupidity. A caveat: My ear may be abnormally sensitive to mispronunciations since in college I developed an unnatural affinity for linguistics (can you say “Get a life?”). However, people often make snap decisions about character and intelligence based on their language biases, so it’s something you should be aware of. Here are some of my pet peeves that you may or may not ever use in your life:

Realtor. Many people–I’ve even heard it from people on national tv–pronounce this word REAL-uh-ter. Is this a case of wide-spread dyslexia–transposing the a and the l? It’s REAL-tor. That’s it. You’d think only two syllables would be easier to pronounce, but apparently not.

Nuclear. Do you know how tough it is to be an advocate for the correct pronunciation of this word (NU-clee-er) when the President of the United States pronounces it NU-cu-lar? I don’t buy that it’s a regional thing. Ya’ll is a regional thing, nu-cu-lar is not.

Jewelry. It’s not JOO-la-ree, it’s JOOL-ree. Again with the making things harder by turning a word into three syllables. What’s with that?

Supposedly/supposably. The latter is a non-existent word.

Supposed to/suppose to: I think this one is a matter of a lazy tongue than ignorance. It takes an extra beat in there to emphasize the “d” at the end, but it’s worth it. And never omit the “d” if you’re using the term in a written communication or people will think you were raised in a hollowed-out tree trunk somewhere.

Used to/use to: Same as above.

Anyway/anyways. There’s no “s” at the end. I swear. Look it up.

February/Febuary: As much as it galls me, there is an r between the b and the u. When you pronounce the word correctly it should sound like you’re trying to talk with a mouthful of marbles–FEB broo ary.

Recur/reoccur: Though the latter is tempting, it’s not a word. And again, why add another syllable if you don’t need it?

Mischievous/mischievious: I know, I know, it sounds so Basil Rathbone to say MIS cha vous, but that’s the right way. Mis CHEE vee us is more commonly used, but it’s wrong.

And last but not least, my personal all-time pet peeve–the word often. It should be pronounced OFF un, not OFF tun. The t is silent.