Any experienced manager will tell you that the single most challenging part of his or her job is not to be found within the mass of technical details that run through a given project’s design, but keeping their workers productively occupied during the inevitable yet unpredictable lulls and logjams that force their way through at inopportune moments. Power outages, equipment failures, traffic jams, sudden, urgent changes in customer specs, etc., etc., will all, at one point or another, intrude upon the orderly execution of any significant project, totally f*ckin’ up your sh*t unless you can convincingly improvise on short notice.
Time is money, and labor is only borrowed, not owned, so you sitting there on your hands is usually not an option. Unless you do something about it now now NOW you’re gonna be up sh*t creek, mon frere. The consequences don’t bear thinking about.
And to add insult to injury, your team, just as inevitably as these interruptions will occur, will view them as opportunity to prove the old adage “idle hands are the Devil’s workshop”. Sure, the odd individual here or there may prove to have some initiative of their own, seizing some previously unidentified flexibility within their own assignments. But that flexibility will always be limited. And frankly, despite the pseudo-folksy drivel of communistic America-haters like Garrison Keillor, it is simply mathematically impossible for ALL the children to be “above average”.… Read the rest
