Almalieque wrote:
Like I said. You can have a well trained staff that knows the answer to a problem. If your staff isn't notifying you on their suggestion, then you simply aren't that important.
I honestly believe you've somehow confused "important" with "stuck in the middle of something". Important people don't involve themselves with the day to day work. They're doing more "important" things. Lower level management/supervisors (bad ones at that) engage in the kind of micromanagement you're describing. That doesn't make them important at all. It makes them poor time managers.
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If you're the head honcho, then you should be notified immediately either before or after such a decision is made.
You're kidding, right? So the CEO of the company should be informed of, and respond to, every action or decision taken by anyone who works in the company? Um... No. It doesn't work that way. The reason he's the CEO is likely because he realizes that that's the wrong way to manage people. It doesn't scale well, and the whole "I have to respond to text messages from my team at any time of the day and night no matter what!" is why it's the wrong way to manage people.
You're using a poor management style to justify doing something which clearly does bother many people. Perhaps you should rethink what you're doing? Just a thought.
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You can try to downplay it all you want with the "fruit loops", but that just tells me that you've never had such responsibility.
That's not responsibility though. You can be responsible and also be smart about how you fulfill your responsibilities. What you are describing is bad management, nothing more.
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Then again, maybe the military just operates completely different. I'm not saying the military is "right", as it does a lot of stupid stuff, just different.
The military does operate differently. I remember once getting into an argument with a co-worker of mine who was also in the Marine Corps about the correct method to do some task. I was watching what he was doing and commented that it would be much more efficient and faster if he did it some other way. He insisted that this was how he was taught to do it in the corps, so it must be the "right way". I had to point out to him that many of the mundane/menial/boring tasks the military has you perform are deliberately made to be done in the most inefficient way possible because they need to keep you busy. There are only so many dishes to wash, latrines to clean, floors to mop, etc and far far more soldiers on a given military base than could possibly be kept busy with the work. Anything they can do to make it take longer to do any one of those is beneficial.
I'm not sure that applies directly to management of a team of people though. Usually, the military is actually quite good at that sort of thing (for what should be obvious reasons). If you think that being responsible for a team of subordinates means you have to respond to a text message from any of them at any time of the day or night immediately, then either you're being used by someone, or you developed that micromanagement style on your own. You should be teaching them to solve their own problems. Off hours messages requiring response should be rare and should be of the extreme emergency nature. Not "I can't find a report". If your staff is calling you about stuff like that, either you or they are failing at their jobs.
