DesertFox- wrote:
I'm told it's weird, especially if you're technically adept. You have to become very hands-off and help people learn to do things you could do yourself in half the time in order to develop their skills. I'm co-leading a project where we nearly didn't have to do work, just manage, but luckily it ended up that we get to participate.
It is hard to step back and watch people fuck something up when you could do it quicker, but its still quicker for me if someone else takes 4 hours when I could have done it in 20 minutes. Thats 20 minutes I can use for surfing the web. My dream is to find an operator who can read a work instruction and follow a process sheet without fucking up, skipping things, doing things out of order or bothering me to walk them through it in the first place. That and one who doesn't believe they remember all the steps from three years ago and actually bothers to pull out the documents to refresh their memory ebfore diving into it. Maybe they could be the same person, perhaps I've gone insane.
Its fucking tedious being Word and Excel mentor to people who really should have learnt it, can't work it out for themselves and can't use the help function. I have one colleague who carries out a single simple robotic task every six months, every single time she has to be hand-held through it even though there is a written procedure in front of her "Now you highlight the cells, then you copy them, then jump to the other spreadsheet and paste them in here" my god...
Managing people - I've done it here and there and don't really like it. There's a fine line between being an asshole and a pushover and I've learned erring on the side of asshole is less effort and more productive in the long run.
Its a massive pain when people bring their personal life into work, one employee's wife phoned me up to ask why her ex-husband was telling her he had to spend all his time at work and couldn't look after the kids and why was the company making him work so hard.
That and people using nepotism to employ relatives who then can't be dealt with properly however useless they are. My manager apparently fired three competent supervisors to promote his girlfriend into the position, I now have to both deal with her and do anything remotely challenging for her.
