COMMUNICATION

There are thousands of Management self-help books out there. I have never been a fan of any of them. The few I have read all are filled with the same kind of Dr. Phil brand of common sense wisdom that makes me think "Seriously... what kind of Manager doesn't know that?" Now I'm not about to go on a rant about what really makes a successful Manager, or a successful company for that matter. What I can rant about is what guarantees failure... poor communication.

As an example it is after 10pm on a weeknight and I am stuck on a conference call trying to figure out why a serious tool outage that impacted hundreds of my employees and my biggest client started at 5pm wasn't reported to anybody who could actually do anything about the issue until 9pm.

Turns out it was some kind of server issue (I'm no IT guy that is just what an IT guy claimed was the root cause just now on my conference call). A quick refresh of something and we were back online, but the fact is that a dozen different "leaders" (and I use that term loosely) sat around assuming that someone was working on the problem already.

Nobody communicated anything, via phone or email. Nobody reached out... nobody asked the questions that needed to be asked. Everybody stuck their heads in the sand and pretended the problem didn't exist and went about their day.

Hell, I didn't leave the office until 6:30... and nobody even knocked on my door to say "Hey I think somethings not right with... yadda yadda"

@#$% me gently with a chainsaw!