Too many Chiefs and not enough Indians.
Which is more demoralising for any person with any degree of self awareness;
a) being shown how to do a job properly and then just ‘nudged’ now and again if they fall short of objectives.
b) having every move managed and ‘adjusted’ if they do not do things in a specific, bureaucratic order with no margin for error or initiative.
My vote goes to b). I’m not just talking about Traffic Wardens here, I’m talking about Britain in general. There was a comic song I grew up hearing entitled “Too many Chiefs and not enough Indians.” This is the situation that nowadays haunts many working weeks. Too many poorly thought out ‘Top down’ solutions. Too much control freakery; In brief, a surplus of Management. Not Managers, Management. Inefficient Management at that. Poor / non existent feedback / monitoring leading to misinformation. Inefficient information handling / correlation / collection leading to a distorted picture of what is really going on. Low quality decisions follow from too narrow a picture. Then when it all looks as though everything’s going pear shaped the shouting starts. When that happens, communication breaks down because most people hate being shouted at. Then we arrive at the situation today which is just a big game of ‘cover your arse’.
Everyone’s hacked off. Maybe it’s just this cold bug that’s doing the rounds. We’ve all lost working time to it. The latest diktat has come down to the shop floor and the grumbling has reached 8.0 on the Richter scale. On the surface it’s another TRO we can’t enforce because of a local councillors political meddling. Now we’ll get accused of being biased. Oo I hate politicians!
a) being shown how to do a job properly and then just ‘nudged’ now and again if they fall short of objectives.
b) having every move managed and ‘adjusted’ if they do not do things in a specific, bureaucratic order with no margin for error or initiative.
My vote goes to b). I’m not just talking about Traffic Wardens here, I’m talking about Britain in general. There was a comic song I grew up hearing entitled “Too many Chiefs and not enough Indians.” This is the situation that nowadays haunts many working weeks. Too many poorly thought out ‘Top down’ solutions. Too much control freakery; In brief, a surplus of Management. Not Managers, Management. Inefficient Management at that. Poor / non existent feedback / monitoring leading to misinformation. Inefficient information handling / correlation / collection leading to a distorted picture of what is really going on. Low quality decisions follow from too narrow a picture. Then when it all looks as though everything’s going pear shaped the shouting starts. When that happens, communication breaks down because most people hate being shouted at. Then we arrive at the situation today which is just a big game of ‘cover your arse’.
Everyone’s hacked off. Maybe it’s just this cold bug that’s doing the rounds. We’ve all lost working time to it. The latest diktat has come down to the shop floor and the grumbling has reached 8.0 on the Richter scale. On the surface it’s another TRO we can’t enforce because of a local councillors political meddling. Now we’ll get accused of being biased. Oo I hate politicians!
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