How many times do you complete a task that you don’t believe in just so that you can tell your manager it’s complete?
Susan was asked by Jerry, her manager, to do a knowledge transfer to her geographically dispersed teammates about a recent internal meeting at HQ.
The internal meeting had been the typical three day death by Powerpoint endurance event. Susan had not seen a single stellar speaker. She heard many "key" messages but not much about the reasoning behind the messages. Now her manager, Jerry, wanted her to share the new knowledge with the team.
Should she tell Jerry that the conference call was a waste of time? She knew there might be some information transfer, but their certainly wasn’t going to be any knowledge transfer without her knowing the reasoning behind the messages.
I’ve been in similar situations. The question is about how concerned my manager is with the quality of the conference call. She may care greatly about the quality of the call. But that may not be the reason for the task. She may not even care enough to get the participant’s feedback. It may be as simple as she wants to tell her manager that the task is complete.
If I sense that the reason for the task is so my manager can check a box with her manager, it’s useless to argue about the merits of other methods for transferring the information. It’s not about the return on time investment for the people on the call, it’s about my manager satisfying her manager’s expectations.
I’m merely a cog in a system that enables my manager to check a box as complete with her manager.
Although I don’t like this situation one bit, it’s fruitless to argue. If I argue about every ridiculous task that I’m ask to do, I’ll decrease my chance of winning an argument about something that is truly important.
I suggest that you check the box and move on. Save you arguments for a situation where it’s about a return on investment rather than checking a box complete for the next level of management.
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