The Friday 10/21/2011 Edition of "Business of pLAy":
In celebration of the IGDA Leadership Forum, which focuses on improving production and leadership skills in the game industry, we present a 2-part special to teach better management through ironic humor: The Bad Manager's Guide.
The Last Minute is the Best Time for Changes
The bad manager assigns tasks to people who have neither the time nor the resources to complete them. Remember to continually and publically scream at people for not being finished yet. Make sure they feel the pain for your lack of planning.
Bonus: Assign multiple time-sensitive tasks to the same person and don’t actually tell the person all the tasks you’ve assigned them.
Avoid: Forecasting and risk assessment. Spending an afternoon talking to experts and thinking through each part of a project before you begin will result in the prevention of major problems down the road. Bad managers know to avoid this as it takes effort and practically ensures a successful project.
Be Vague With Goals and Instructions
You know that incredibly stupid and impulsive idea you just had while pretending to listen to an employee? Assuming you didn’t steal the idea from the competent employee you were “listening” to; make everyone drop whatever they are doing and focus all their attention on it! What? You say they don’t understand your crazy idea want guidance on how to accomplish it? Uh-oh, that sounds dangerously like productive work. Fortunately, there is an easy out: “creative freedom”. Just tell your employees you don’t want to impede their “creative freedom” and you can leave all the dirty details in their hands!
Bonus: Create pointless, time-consuming goals that are not technically feasible. Just because “experts” and “geniuses” have been unsuccessfully tackling a problem for decades or centuries doesn’t mean you can’t expect it to be done by Friday.
Avoid: Clarity and documentation. Good managers know that an idea in your head is completely different from a plan on paper. Some good managers will hold meetings to bounce ideas off their team; but they never expect these ideas to be enacted without first taking the time to create a plan of action and properly assess its risks, requirements, and returns on investment. Vagueness is frustrating and confusing – both of which lead to demotivation and failure - awesome!
Deadlines are for Other People
Bad managers know deadlines are really just a suggestion. In fact, you shouldn’t even consider other people's deadlines, just blow them all. But be completely unforgiving of anyone who even slightly misses a deadline you set. Remind the employee who had a heart attack that if you make an exception for him, you’ll have to make exceptions for everyone. What if you need a 2 week job done by an outside vendor, contractor, or department in 24 hours? Just scream threats at them, they love that and it is sure to prevent them from accommodating you.
Bonus: Assign deadlines randomly and then move them up with no explanation. In fact, don’t even tell someone when you move a deadline. Just yell at the person (publically) for not being done. If it is a vendor, yell at an innocent customer service rep and then badmouth the business online.
Avoid: Creating, tracking, and sharing schedules. This would remind you and inform others when a deadline is on its way. It would also give you dangerously useful information like how long certain tasks take or what stage each task is in at any point in the project.
Treat Every Problem as a Life-or-Death Crisis
A bad manager knows that even a delicate birthday candle should be lit with a flamethrower. Sure, in the process you’ll also set fire to the cake, the table, and the kitchen; but that’s the fire department’s problem - your part is finished. More importantly, you ensure serious problems will be missed simply by distracting everyone and stressing them out over minor issues – like the lack of blue pens in the conference room.
Avoid: Triaging. Good managers avoid exploding small problems into big problems by handling each situation early, tactfully, and with an appropriately scaled response. Wasting time and brain power to assess and prioritize problems improves efficiency and often prevents crisis before they begin. Steer clear of this if you want your project to fail miserably.
Be Impossible to Find
Vacations are one thing, but you have to go completely dark ALL THE TIME. This is especially critical when deadlines are looming or a major crisis is unfolding. Emails should go perpetually unchecked. All calls should go into the black hole of voicemail. Delete texts without reading them. The time you would spend handling these things should be reallocated to inventing excuses for not doing these things.
Bonus: Frequently spam a Twitter or Facebook account with unimportant information that demonstrates what you are wasting your time with: "Drinking expensive coffee at new café, needs cream" or "Someone send me fertilizer for my FarmCity". This will let people know you are spending your time on things other than returning their messages and handling their critical issues.
Avoid: Staying connected. When people can find you, you are in danger of being productive or actually preventing a major crisis. Worse still, when employees have a reliable point of contact, they won’t waste valuable time scrounging for information and resources.
Create Bottlenecks for Everything
Make sure everything has to go through you - this works especially well if you never get around to actually checking on anything or are impossible to contact. Never trust employees to act on their own; they should be spending all of their time chasing approvals instead of being productive.
Avoid: Empowering employees. Some managers find incredible success by authorizing their employees to make decisions that cost under $400 and take less than a week to complete. If you want your project to fail, avoid this strategy like the plague.
Block Process Improvement
Problem: some tasks need to be done repeatedly; unfortunately, an employee learns how to perform a task better, faster, or more efficiently with every repetition. How does a bad manager get around this? Easily! Never talk (or listen) to an employee who has completed a task. Better yet, with every repetition, randomly reassign this task to a new person who has no communication with the original person who completed the task.
Avoid: Process Reviews. Reviews are a sure path to learning and supporting process improvements. That could result in streamlining processes - thus leading to faster, better productivity. How are you supposed to fail if you keep improving?~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Please look forward to the next installment: The Bad Manager’s Guide to Team Mismanagement
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