Comments on: Management by conversation

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 09 May 2007 05:23:36 +0000

(nods) I used to frequently describe my job as a series of exchanges where people would say “I have a problem, X, with solution Y. What should I do?”

And I would say “Wait, wait, wait. Your problem is X?” And they would nod.
And I would say “And your solution is Y?” And they would say “Great, thanks!” and run off.

And I’ve become used to writing emails that go “I don’t really understand your question. You _might_ mean X, but you probably don’t. You _might_ mean Y, but that would be stupid. You might mean Z… in fact you almost certainly do.” then deleting that email and starting over with “Assuming you mean Z, the answer is blah.”

But my favorite was when someone came to me with a proposed implementation to review and, after reviewing it, I said “It looks OK to me, but you should run it by so-and-so as well, because he understands this stuff better than I do. For example, he will undoubtedly catch that error over there, which I missed.”

Entirely sincerely.

My head is a strange and wondrous place.

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Thinking by talking || April || 2007

Sat, 14 Apr 2007 00:35:53 +0000

[...] I had a teddy bear moment today. I was trying to debug something at work, got stuck, asked one of my coworkers to help me, explained the problem to him, and said “Oh, I see what’s going on” without them saying anything. I guess I should bring a teddy bear into work so that I can explain problems to it before bothering my coworkers. [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || But it’s just talking! || March || 2007

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 03:27:55 +0000

[...] Sometimes thinking through ideas out loud is the only way the next step can be identified. Just by forcing their team members to articulate what’s going on, managers can often move people forward when they’re stuck in “blank page” syndrome or are procrastinating. My best manager (the coworker mentioned in that post actually) dropped by my desk once a week, in classic HP “management by walking around” fashion, to review what I’d done the past week, where I was stuck, and what I should get done the next week. It wasn’t any sort of formal meeting, but it helped me stay focused and gave me a chance to get unstuck. [...]