Reply to Advice to (what appears to be younger) posters: Not everyone is equal at work

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What you're not getting, OP, is that most folks don't have a sense of who the "high performers" are and don't get that they aren't in that class. So, the differentiated treatment appears arbitrary, when in fact it's actually merit based - but the mediocre employees has incomplete information and doesn't realize that's the case.

Further, most supervisors don't know how to give proper feedback, so they go around telling their employees "good job! you're doing great!" as a means to boost morale, but they don't give specific enough feedback so that individual employees can assess their strengths & weaknesses.

Now, if an enthusiastic, hard worker who maybe lacks emotional intelligence takes these "good job" comments at face value, given that it's the only feedback he gets all year, then he'll probably conclude that he is indeed doing a good job and there are no major issues. The fact that he's unaware of his weaknesses and isn't progressing is certainly on him, but I also would say that at least part of the responsibility for his stagnation is his supervisor's inability to have productive conversations around performance. These conversations don't have to be awkward, and when done well can mean getting a lot more out of your employees.[/quote]

It gets back to the position that I can not spend my days babysitting employees.[/quote]

I think it gets to the point that most companies are structured in such a way that in order to advance in pay & stature, you have to take on management responsibilities, but many technical subject matter experts don't actually have an interest in supervisory responsibilities, nor do they have any talent for it. Yet, the #1 reason employees leave is because of their boss - resulting in the high turn over rate that seems to have so many firms perplexed. There are a lot of new ideas about how to restructure advancement tracks so that only the people actually interested in management responsibilities take them on. It's good reading, IMO. [/quote]

This is the correct response. The managers on this forum who are whining about juggling management responsibilities are not high-performing managers. Maybe they are high-performing engineers, but not managers. [/quote]

And conversely, I currently have a supervisor who really is interested in management, puts a lot of effort into it, and spends her free time reading up on how to be a better manager - yet has no subject matter expertise in the unit she's managing. But given the cross-section of responsibilities between management and expertise, she has to fake it and pretend she knows what she's talking about. On a personal level, I like her and wish her the best. On a working level, it is very difficult to have the technical substance of your work supervised by some one who lacks familiarity with it, yet neither of us can acknowledge the situation as is. I'd love to just do my thing and let her look good for it - but she has to show that she knows her stuff, and she doesn't. So she steps in to "improve" (=ruin) my work product, because if she doesn't demonstrate expertise, they'll take away her management responsibilities.

I'm sure she'll be figured out soon enough, but this corporate structure really just makes no sense at all. [/quote]

We went through a phase like this in my company.  They hired PM's without technical expertise to supervise complex scientific/engineering problems.  As a group, the failed miserably.  It was a disaster for the company.  [/quote]

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