Trusting the team
We had a user training workshop on Thursday. They gave a good reception to the software, and a very favourable reception to the training itself. The developers took turns to present different features.
We had a day of rehearsals before hand. Even before that each developer drafted a handout, which I reviewed. I had to leave during the event for a management meeting, so I thought that it was more important that the developers become confident than that every detail is right. The actual results were excellent.
The head of the project, Len, didn't see it that way. He sent an email about an early draft of the handouts saying "this looks like shit". He expected me to get everyting right before the rehearsal. His email was copied to the developers' email list. Fortunately he is not a member, so they did not see it.
I think he replied to me without checking the distribution list, but I used this as a pretext for a fight. I really didn't want him to come to the rehearsals with a potty mouth. It isn't email Tourette's, it is a theory of management which he defends. He says that a number of projects have been saved by him kicking butt.
I wrote back asking to meet with him privately, and asking for a response the next morning or else "our discussion will not be private". His next response was even more obscene, in capitals forsooth. The result was he did not come to the rehearsal, and we did have an exchange of views, moderated by someone even more senior.
During the rehearsals, I realised that I need not have been so worried. The team is now so strong that if he swears at any of them, we can wipe the floor with him. (Unfortunately, I'll have to put up with his language. Some mocking responses should help my feelings.)
Note to self: trust the team.
Standing Up
Thanks for continuing to fill us in on your saga, Chris. I would say that your team is the stronger for their having witnessed your standing up for them, and that you have gained additional trust and respect in the process. I've worked on teams where the leadership did not push back when louts from elsewhere in the organization came in shoving and shouting, and it does not generally have a positive influence on morale. At the same time, I try to remember that it can be difficult to stand up when one has other things to lose (like health benefits for a sick child at home) and when one is really not interested in the supposed spoils to be gained from political infighting. I suppose that is what bullies like this guy count on...
Thanks again,
Dan
Any Solutions?
Chris -- I'm curious to know if the management bully offered any kind of solutions or reasons as to why he was dissatisfied with the handouts. My experience of bully management is that they just like to throw punches and not actually articulate their motivation.
You handled the situation just right in my book.
Teamwork
Hi Trevor. Len's criticisms of the handouts were accurate but not timely. The style was not uniform. e.g. some developers included screenshots. Different authoring tools were used. I did not neaten up the HTML before putting the draft on the web.
The timing of his comment was not good, because to get the handouts perfect in good time would have meant micromanaging. Empowering the team to prepare the event meant it would be only just in time.
Actually, the original plan did not involve handouts. I asked for them so I could know that the preparation was being done, and so I (and our senior customer) could review them before the team meeting, and ask any additional preparation that was needed.
The outcome was the team did a great job ... and some reports that Len had to produce were a mess, he accidentally issued an early draft instead of the final report.
Edward's comments are much like my contingency plan.
I won't disclose the actual plan, since this blog may not stay confidential for ever, but a UK context modifies the tactics a little.
Len hasn't actually sworn at any developer yet, I have managed to suck it all in, but it could happen, and then I unleash hell. There's one exception, one developer reports to him, so there I can give no protection: I work for a different institution.
I now know that Len met other managers while the developers' meeting was going on and said he could not work with me. They told him that he had to. They also told me that I had to work with him.
The reality is that the project needs both of us to succeed. We have incompatible management styles, and we both tend to regard this as an issue of principle, which is more important to us than any one project. Time for me to be the adult.
Good job
Sounds like you are the grown up. Best of luck in this tough job.
That manager is insane!
Your team needs to get him to STOP managing by a foul mouth.
You need to meet as a group and get everybody to agree to going, as a group, to his boss and complaining.
The manager's behavior probably constitutes sexual discrimination even in the case of an all male team, because the use of profanity IN A CONTEXT WHERE IT IS NOT NORMED, BY A MAN IN AUTHORITY has been found in several cases to be sexual discrimination.
Note: I use profanity on usenet because it is a rough neighborhood. This is different because on usenet nobody is in charge. I use profanity here because I am not in charge, as a writer. That is, the power situation forms a grammar wherein it is indeed permissible for me, as a man with no institutional power here, to say to Newt Gingrich, shove it, whereas it bars your manager from doing this because he's a company spokesperson, and through him a public or private company is telling employees that they are not entitled to a nonthreatening environment.
A "bad word" isn't a regular expression of the form *badWord*. It has differing interpretations in different power contexts for the same reason it's not grammatical for a student to give a command to a teacher as opposed to a request.
The company is probably VIOLATING THE LAW by continuing to employ a man who sexually harasses men (and *a fortiori* women) on the team, by telling them that as a condition of employment they must be shamed and told they can no longer live in a civil environment owing to their putative incompetence as programmers.
Sexual harassment in law and in theory is not about "sex". It's about power.
You need to agree to risk your collective butts by complaining as a group to the guy's manager. When he threatens to fire you, you need to say that collectively you have the funds, presuming you agree you do, to retain counsel to bring a lawsuit.
I saw this shit grow and grow in American programming workplaces. I saw ignorant and foul mouthed men drive people to tears by forcing them to work 16 hour days while listening to their mates being DEMEANED, HARASSED, and DEGRADED by managers unable to code a single line of correct code or write a complete sentence, with their goddamn little "theories" of management.
I walked away from this fucking shit. And I'd rather live in a homeless shelter than endure a minute in some companies that I've worked for, including startups set up to milk venture capital, companies run by foul mouthed martinets, and companies so utterly disorganized that nothing was done yet the programmers were the target of blame.
Karl Rove manages by means of a foul mouth, as does John Bolton. These are two men that have gotten 3000 men and women killed in Iraq in a war they could not endure fighting.
They pretend in other words to be tough guys, and oh so superior to mere intelligence analysts or programmers. They use intellectual production like apes.
But when you stand up for your rights they will fold. I worked for a foul mouthed tyrant and after he refused to consider letting me rewrite 150 incompetent Access macros as a single VBA program, I quit, inviting him in a meeting to perform an unnatural act while my laptop screen saver displayed IF YOU HAD BEHAVED NICELY THE COMMUNISTS WOULDN'T EXIST.
I got my performance bonus from this guy despite this conduct, because he realized that I wasn't going to put up with threats and abuse.
I had previous to this and subsequent been restrained as I am today in my on the job conduct. But sooner or later this on the job bullying has to stop.
Are we not men?
You have the patience of a saint, Chris
...but...
why is it that we have to spend so much time rehearsing the truth, and presenting it? Our jobs are hard enough.
Having said this, I was carefully trained back in the day to Present, back in the day when we had to use Selectric typewriters, copiers, and gallons of Liquid Paper.
Thomas Franks, author of Fiasco, on the complete failure of the Iraq war, describes in fact how midlevel military people spent more time rehearsing what they were going to say in Powerpoint briefings than fighting the enemy.
He gives a specimen screen.
It is meaningless.
The anger in the trenches is real.
I cannot speak to your situation, having been in similar but by no means identical situations. Sometimes spin is important.
But again I ask...who is the user?
Are we not men?
Who is my friend?
And Lenin asked...what is to be done?
[That'll knock 'em dead, Chris, Lenin in Powerpoint.]