December 17, 2008 at 11:35 am
kevin labranche (12/17/2008)
The best one was a boss who understood that it was my job to "get stuff done" and it was his job to "apologize for me".
Oh, OUCHHH. What a great boss!!! EEEEKKK! How do so many get into power and not realize the power of their words.... Please tell me you somehow got this boss to realize the massive error in their thinking on this one!
A manager's job is to remove as many roadblocks that are possible for their team and then apologize and take to fall to their manager when things still fail. Hello!!! We are the leader of the team. Which by the way means giving the team the praise for a job well done not yourself....
I certainly don't know how I would have reacted if I was told that but I can imagine it would not have been good even if I never spoke my thoughts to the manager.
I think something got lost in translation here. Are you saying you liked the previous quote, or that the manager should not have said such?
December 17, 2008 at 12:09 pm
I was a little unclear, too, but I think he meant that he liked the mindset and wondered how I got that particular boss from his Bad Old Thinking™ to the Truth™. I could misunderstand, though.
As for that particular boss, it was pretty easy (back in the days of Netware, when NT 3.51 was shiny and new). He and I were both cow-orkers on the same network services team before the previous PHB left under a cloud ($50k in departmental lunch expenses in less than a year, etc), and we knew how each other worked. We both applied for the job, and he got it. Something silly about 11 years more seniority than I had... *sigh*
Anyway, I was the security officer and senior admin, and frequently did things in the name of good security that resulted in ire from one parter (in the law firm) or another. During our first 1:1 after he was awarded the honor of being my boss, I laid out my expectations of our relationship: I get stuff done. You apologize for me, as needed. Deal?
Seems like a lot more than one decade later, I still keep in touch with Patrick. Good bosses are hard to find.
I did have a manager once who could yell at someone and make him feel better about himself at the same time. She left me for a job in Ireland. *pout* Since I'm being nostalgic (while everyone else is @ home being afraid of the non-snow event), I'll take a moment to miss Reesa, too.
December 17, 2008 at 3:38 pm
When I was a rookie developer we had a client that printed about 3000 cheques (checks for the US) a month to pay out to their clients. So, the first month after installing our newly developed system on their computers, we did the first cheque print run. I worked from 08:00 the morning till 05:00 the next morning to get these cheques printed. We have had to sort out some bugs in the system and when eventually (we did this at our own offices) we walked in that morning to take their cheques to them, tired but happy it is done, they did some spot checks and found that all the cheques were wrong. I was there alone and had to face the music. I phoned my boss and told him what had happened. He said: "Don't worry, we'll sort this out." That was only because I was a rookie and he felt guilty for letting too much of this job over to me. If your boss takes the flak for you then you're blessed. Now, my boss will just hammer me if something goes wrong.:D:D
:-PManie Verster
Developer
Johannesburg
South Africa
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. - Holy Bible
I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times. - Everett Mckinley Dirkson (Well, I am trying. - Manie Verster)
December 19, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Sorry for the confusion. I think the quote is a very poor statement. As a manager we should take the blame for our team always and give them the praise whenever necessary. I'm of the opinion a manager should take the shots for the team and work out issues within the team behind the scenes.
However, after reading the secondary post I can see that this wasn't necessarily a bad statement. Funny how context matters... 🙂
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