Doing Everyone Else's Job

In the 1990's UPS spent a lot of effort grooming promising junior employees to move up the ranks and become managers. They would then move the managers around to different locations, thinking that good manager can manage any dept. Many of these guys had moved up from being delivery drivers. It became interesting when they would get assigned to manage the IT division, which was developing and supporting internal and external software products, as well as various help desks.

If you’re part of what is known as the general career track (総合職) and are actually being groomed for (middle) management, it’s common policy to move people every 3 years, in theory it prevents building of fiefdoms while also giving you a chance to improve your network, know the ins and outs of your company/government agency and give you the opportunity to accumulate small wins along the way.

The silly policy also extends towards things like supermarket managers, midsized companies with a country wide branch network public school teachers and other nonmilitary civil service positions.

If you’re a primary school teacher, you likely won’t see your students graduate.

> If a manager doesn’t actually manage anything, this is fine as long as you can go to his people and effectively manage them

> but you can usually find people in his org who’ll work with you, on the theory that they’re supposed to.

In 100% of the cases where someone has tried this on me, both as the manager and the naive employee, the real reason was that they didn’t care about what the manager/employee was supposed to be doing. They were looking for easy targets who could be abused to do their team’s work. Most of the “manager doesn’t manage anything” accusations came from other teams who weren’t even trying to understand what other managers or teams did. If the other manager or team wasn’t actively working for them in some capacity, they thought the manager wasn’t doing anything.

> It’s true that many of them have long figured out that they’re really supposed to follow orders passed down the hierarchy and do nothing else, even if everything around them is on fire. But some never figure this out, and most managers fail to punish at least some of these slow learners of theirs, so they’re yours to work with.

The most generous interpretation is that this is taken idle employees and putting them to use for the greater good, but most of the cases I’ve seen in real companies are from one arrogant manager spreading their work across any workers gullible enough to do anything you ask of them.

I’ve worked with and hired a lot of really nice people who always want to lend a helping hand. They’re great, but many of them have a real problem handling workplace sharks like this who will saunter over to their desk (or DMs) and persuade them to work on something else, which puts them behind on their own work. When it happens chronically it gets so bad that you have to start checking in almost daily to make sure they haven’t been pulled into yet another team’s workload from a Slack DM or email.

Helping other teams when time is available is a good thing generally. You need to make your manager aware of the incoming requests and time spent, though. Don’t become the person who is working themself to the bone for everyone who comes over with a request but is holding their own team back because they can’t focus on their actual work.

My mom worked at Cisco in a non-technical role for 30 years, and they did this. She was an IC and then manager for 3-5 years at a time on a bunch of different teams.

> the real reason was that they didn’t care about what the manager/employee was supposed to be doing.

This is true of course, but you say it as if it’s a bad thing. At the end of the day, everyone has to manage their own time. If everyone only cared about chain of command and scheduled priorities, overall efficiency would plummet. Simple wins that just require a small amount of coordination outside the official org chart would be killed in committees and program manager reviews.

I understand the exploitative dynamic you’re describing, I just think there are many failure modes for productive operations that have to be balanced in some meta way.