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Supervisors often prefer rule breakers, up to a point

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Re: Supervisors often prefer rule breakers, up to a point

#141

Post by empath75 »

pixl97 wrote: post #125
empath75 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the pretense is that the game is a self contained reality and once the game is over, everyone has a life they can go on living. Tripping someone on the way to scoring a goal is _unfair_, and there is a defined penalty for it, but when the game is over, that's the end of the consequences for it. There are, though, lots of penalties in hockey that are about not hurting or maiming (or even killing) people, and…

I mean, it just seems like a false or unrealistic pretense to me. For example while a hockey game is a 'game' what about a person making a bet on that game that now loses a bet because of the penalty actions? Or a team loses that would have won because of said penalty and does not go to the world championship. So yea, saying there is no consequences is like rejecting the premise of causality as the game doesn't live…

> Or a team loses that would have won because of said penalty and does not go to the world championship.

What if they lost the bet because they missed a goal because they slipped on the ice? What if they missed the goal because they blocked it? Taking a strategic penalty isn't _cheating_, it's acting within the rules of the game. The rules are _if_ you take such an action, _then_ the following consequence occurs.

It's sort of dependent on the game and the penalty, though, what the norms are. In soccer, basketball, hockey and football, strategic fouls/penalties happen all the time to prevent scoring opportunities -- holding, etc. That's not considered cheating, it's just part of the game, you trade a sure goal for a penalty.

There _are_ some actions that are considered cheating though -- think inflategate in the NFL, or stealing signs with cameras in baseball. Stuff that isn't generally caught and penalized in the game -- that's the kind of thing that most players won't do, even at the top level.

Re: Supervisors often prefer rule breakers, up to a point

#142

Post by bell-cot »

RunSet wrote: post #127

> While incompetence is merely a barrier to further promotion, "super-incompetence" is grounds for dismissal, as is "super-competence". In both cases, "they tend to disrupt the hierarchy." One specific example of a super-competent employee is a teacher of children with special needs: they were so effective at educating the children that, after a year, they exceeded all expectations at reading and arithmetic, but the…

> ...a teacher of children with special needs...fired...

Note that that example is from (at latest) the 1960's. These days, at least in better-off areas, the parents of the affected special needs kids would likely make life hell for the School Board behind that firing.

More generally: If your super-competence is highly beneficial to some folks further up the pecking order, that often takes precedence.

Re: Supervisors often prefer rule breakers, up to a point

#144

Post by madrox »

heymijo wrote: post #101
madrox wrote: post #40

As a supervisor I didn’t resonate with this until I remembered in some jobs I have communicated the company attendance policy but didn’t enforce it unless someone was a poor performer. I trust adults to manage their own time until they give me a reason to believe otherwise. For my part, I’d rather trust people’s judgment and intrinsic motivation than enforce the rules. Enforcement is annoying, tedious, and distractin…

And while this works for you, labor and employment attorneys use your non-standard application of the rules as a way to win lawsuits when brought against the company. Another way we end up with annoying, tedious, and distracting compliance (U.S. based take here).

A very fair and reasonable point

Re: Supervisors often prefer rule breakers, up to a point

#145

Post by betenoire »

ecb_penguin wrote: post #104
s1artibartfast wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cops have no legal obligation in the US to protect people from crime. They can watch you be mugged without lifting a finger. They might be fired, but the victim isn't entitled to protection. It basically comes down to positive and negative rights. Someone is at fault if they harm you, but nobody is required to help you, even the government.

If police had a legal obligation to protect people from crime, everyone would have recourse if the police failed to protect them. Bar fight? Sue the police. Domestic violence? Sue the police. It would literally lead to the collapse of the justice system.

Really? You don't think there is a middle ground? Are the cops watching this fight or hearing about or later?

Re: Supervisors often prefer rule breakers, up to a point

#146

Post by zamadatix »

martinsnow wrote: post #140
andruby wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a rather binary view and I disagree that rules always fall in either category. Knowing _why_ a rule exists and what it's trying to prevent/achieve is much more valuable in my opinion. Wether or not to follow or bend a rule depends so much on the context.

Your argument circles back to the posters point. Knowing which rule you can break at a specific point in time. Why are you being so anal about it?

I think it's a worthwhile addition to highlight there is 3) rules which are sometimes red tape and sometimes to be broken, on top of the other 2 categories. It adds on to the original point with the addition of how to universally discover what the categories are rather than prescribe them up front.

Re: Supervisors often prefer rule breakers, up to a point

#147

Post by heisenbit »

Breaking rules by subordinates frees supervisors from properly delegating power (implies taking responsibility for the delegation) or changing the rules (again taking responsibility). It is a quite convenient stance - something works you win - it fails not your fault.

Re: Supervisors often prefer rule breakers, up to a point

#148

Post by gwern »

Preprint: https://www.celiamoore.com/uploads/9/3/2/1/9321973/wakeman_y...

A useful concept here is the 'incompleteness of contracts' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incomplete_contracts): essentially, even for the simplest contract, it is impossible to write down an unambiguous set of rules or contract terms covering every possible outcome or disagreement. Contracts can only be starting points. This is similar to the failure of GOFAI to turn the world into symbolic rules: it may be possible in theory, but not in practice. Anytime a principle hires an agent, they have to leave a lot up to the agent, which is why we have principle-agent problems. So what does that imply for any 'rule'? Well, that it has to be wrong and destructive some of the time. (See also: "work-to-rule strike" or sabotage.) This will be especially true for rules imposed from the outside: if it's impossible for individuals or organizations given a free hand to make perfect rules that should always be followed, how on earth is some third party, like the dead hand of a regulation from a century ago, going to do so? So you want your agents to break the rules... but only, of course, when it's a good thing to break the rules. How do you know that? Well, if it was easy to do so cheaply, you probably wouldn't have the rule in the first place! So in practice, a lot of what happens is just this: if your agent breaks the rules periodically and nothing bad happens, then they probably were doing the right thing; and if your organization encourages the right amount of rulebreaking, it will slightly tend to do better than the ones which don't.

Of course, sometimes your agents weren't doing the right wrong things, just the wrong wrong things, and you just normalized their deviance which is going to explode in someone's face eventually. That is of course true. But if you cherrypick just a few sensational cases and treat them as if that was what supervisors were trying to encourage, you implicitly are denying that the lubricant of the world is often well-chosen rule-breaking.

Re: Supervisors often prefer rule breakers, up to a point

#149

Post by throwup238 »

zamadatix wrote: post #146
martinsnow wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument circles back to the posters point. Knowing which rule you can break at a specific point in time. Why are you being so anal about it?

I think it's a worthwhile addition to highlight there is 3) rules which are sometimes red tape and sometimes to be broken, on top of the other 2 categories. It adds on to the original point with the addition of how to universally discover what the categories are rather than prescribe them up front.

To add to that, #3 is often explicitly encoded into the red tape as an escape hatch for foreseeable exceptional circumstances like disaster recovery and big client emergencies.

Re: Supervisors often prefer rule breakers, up to a point

#150

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Zak wrote: post #121
ike2792 wrote: post #116

In any large organization, there are basically two classes of rules: 1) stupid red tape rules that slow everyone down and 2) really important rules that you can never break ever. Effective people learn which rules fall into which group so they can break the red tape rules and get more stuff done.

This study seems to be focused on breaking rules imposed on the organization by external entities, not rules the organization created independently to support its own objectives. Supervisors aligned with an organization's goals likely often view such external rules with contempt. It's not surprising they tolerate or support rule breaking as long as they believe it won't be punished externally.

> study seems to be focused on breaking rules imposed on the organization by external entities

Those rules similarly fall into traffic tickets and murder charges.

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