Spurious Logic

Management Skills

So we had some senior management people in a while back. An email went around from our immediate superiors with a general "Quick, look busy! Tidy up that desk, shave and wear your good shirt"  type warning. Which is fair enough.

It did get me thinking though, do these people only ever see massively productive, tidy offices? Is there complete and total concentration and focus on work whenever they walk into a room? If so it would seem to me that a major skill for top level executives would be detecting bullshit.

Of course your immediate supervisor should know to within an half day what tasks your working on, how well you're doing and whether or not you're pulling your weight. And their superiors should know in general how teams are going along with a progress plan of overall projects. And in the heady height above that, there should be an awareness of how offices/locations are doing.

But when those with only an overall view only ever see low level workers pounding furiously at keys and intensely discussing the interopability of the Widget 2.831 webservice they cannot take it at face value. Becuase that's all they ever see. They never see people slacking off, talking about sports and checking gmail.