Jackie was a bit of a “player.” He admitted as much himself as we sat at the picnic table outside the facilities management building on the Thursday before his final day at work. He had a big personality, and for a decent stretch it looked like it was all working. Everybody knew Jackie, and many thought he was higher on the food chain than he really was.
“It happened so fast. I thought I knew what I was doing, but I was clueless about the politics.”
Actually, for awhile there Jackie looked like a political maestro, but the story of how it all came crashing down boiled down, according to Jackie, to “realizing too late, that I’d pissed off somebody I thought had my back.”
Anyone who manages or supervises has a personal philosophy about how the world really works, even when they aren’t particularly deep thinkers and have never cracked a philosophy book.
Who really runs the show? Who’s got the real power? What will it cost me if I say out loud I’m for or against someone’s idea? What will really happen if I choose A over B? How honest can I be? Who can I actually trust to say what I think? How much autonomy do I really have? Who do I really go to when I need to address a sticky problem? How much is it true, really, that being good at the work means honest mistakes aren’t punished? Is it true that the real, but unspoken task is to make your boss look good, and there’s a price to pay if you don’t?
Some totally avoid thinking about things like that and they’d probably pass a lie detector test, but their actions reveal that their basic instinct – survival instinct for some – is to clue into stuff like that and operate accordingly.
One problem is the employees are watching. They notice what’s really true about a supervisor’s character and integrity. Jackie wasn’t a terrible supervisor and he wasn’t lazy, but he put a lot of energy into schmoozing and he liked the limelight. So Jackie’s fan base was a mile wide and an inch deep.
We all need to pay our bills, and compromising with less-than-ideal is something we all do sometimes – but we need to be doing more than surviving. We have interesting things to tell ourselves about ourselves – if we’d only just listen.
