I was a manager for the last half of my career. One of the funny
things that happened as a manager was I was a support manager over two
offices that supported our operational facility.
I had been an operations manager and a supervisor before that. And so
I knew what was going on in the operation and I had suffered through
many briefings from support managers and support staff on what they
did and how they expected us to use them to help them.
Typically the presentations that the support offices gave had a lot of
words and a lot of chapter and verse from the handbook and the
different orders that drove how we were supposed to do things in our
operation and in our facility.
While I was a support manager, the operations managers were younger
than me and ready to change the world. And so when it came time to
have a supervisor seminar, they demanded that my office's briefings
not be just a bunch of words on a screen that somebody sits there and
reads to them.
I looked around the room, and I said, are you sure you want that?
Because that's typically the most informative way to get information
to you guys that everybody understands. They responded that "We're
tired of seeing the same thing, David, and we want something better."
One of the things that I found funny was they thought that they were
demanding something from me that I couldn't provide. That I was not
unwilling to provide. They were young and from other facilities and so
they didn't understand that I was a revolutionary and this was what I
lived for, to do things differently.
As a support manager I felt so bound by the way things had to always
been and the way the orders were phrased and interpreted and I
couldn't get around them. But I could provide a briefing that was a
lot different than anything they had ever had.
So when the supervisor seminar came and I had a room full of
supervisors and a couple of operations managers in the room. I started
my presentation and told them who was in my office that I managed and
then I showed them one slide with pictures on it. Each picture was an
icon or small thumbnail of different aspects of what we did in our
office. I proceeded to use a stick pointer to point to each picture
and describe that activity that we did in our office and how it was
supposed to be activated with us and what they could expect from us
when they asked us to support them on that aspect of our duties. As I
went through it everybody really enjoyed it. Everybody except the
operations managers.
These younger managers thought I was being flippant and disrespectful
and so when my manager called me into his office and talked to me and
told me that I laughed and I said I gave them exactly what they asked
for.
No words, just pictures. I literally drew them a picture and they
still don't understand I don't know what else to do. My manager went
back to them and chewed them out and said David drew you a picture he
drew you a lot of pictures why don't you shut the hell up.
I hope they use that presentation in the future! It was such a great
stroke of brilliance on my part :-) I did it for the other office that
I managed at the time also and it was a completely different set of
pictures and icons. I even had door prizes that I handed out, little
doodads for everybody to take home with them. The supervisors loved
it, the operations managers not so much.
That's the story of my career, over and over and over. I reached the
people that actually did the work, and the people who just took credit
for the work didn't understand and didn't like me LOL
