Mind The Gap

Virginia, another lovely lady from my day job, recently moved into a new home with her husband, and they kindly passed on the outdated chandelier from their living room to me. It’s very mid 70′s to mid 80′s, which goes in pretty well with the funky retro thing Ryan and I have been doing in our place, so it fits perfectly, which is awesome. It was the kind of light that’s wired into the ceiling, but I took out the extra grounding wire, and removed all the ceiling mounting bits, and used a swag kit to extend the wire and chain (I needed an extra long chain for this particular implementation).

Once that was all wired up and tested, Ryan helped me put the holes in the ceiling of our loft bedroom so we could install some swag hooks. Then I hung the chandelier up in the center of the room, and we ran the extra chain over to another hook in the corner, and down the wall to an outlet that is wired up to a light switch in the room. The loft bedroom in the apartment never really had an overhead light, so it was usually kind of dim, adding this big light, normally intended for a dining room, has added a lot of light, and is pretty swanky and neato. Here’s a picture:

Also, I sold another piece of artwork!

Fear of No Longer Being Needed

It is a natural human instinct to want to feel valued and needed by those around you, and so much time is spent in the workplace, it is to be expected that this social behavior would go on at the office. At work, many people gauge their own value by how much they are needed by others. Some managers grade themselves by how often they have to swoop in and save the day which indicates to them how needed they are at the company. This provides a boost to their perception of their own value. However this trait could be an indication that staff is not being managed well because they cannot do anything of importance without constant supervision and guidance. If they did run like a well oiled machine this would cause the manager to feel lacking as their own self value is threatened by not being needed overtly.

A manager’s out of balance fear of no longer being needed might possibly stem from a belief that if they are no longer needed in the position they are filling, then they will be let go and will become unemployed, quite a mess indeed. Other managers of course feel that when they have led and developed a group of people so well that they can now run with minimal or no supervision, then this happening can be nothing but good, and increases prospects for promotion, where the manager will be given other groups of people to lead, and thereby more prestige and a broader range of authority, and the opportunity to gain access to more knowledge, resources and opportunity to advance. Some managers are trying to hold on to what they have, while true leaders are always looking to do more and mold more of their vision into reality.

A manager who is afraid of no longer being needed by the company may maintain the level of need for them in a number of ways. A manager who wants to be needed may basically sabotage the people under his or her leadership. Managers who hoard information, and then send their subordinates out to make decisions based upon information they have not been given, are bound to be needed, because the decisions of the employees will be poorly made, and the manager will have the information to solve the resulting problems from those misinformed decisions. The manager is needed to fix things up, and by all outside appearances, it looks as though the employee is the one who did wrong…whew, it is a good thing that manager was there.

Likewise a manager may fail to properly train employees, and of course then they will fail at their tasks and the manager must jump in to get things back in line. In a similar vein, a manager may fail to clearly communicate to an employee what his or her duties are, and employee who does not know what to do will most certainly leave out something, and so the manager is needed to pick up the slack.

This diversionist behavior must be a conscious choice by the manager. This type of manager fails to see that a person actively choosing to behave this way, is actually making themselves too important to the completion of tasks, which is a bad thing as it is effectively makes them one dimensional and holds back both themselves and their charges from attaining their potential. It is hard to believe that a person would choose this path if they believed they had the skills and ability to advance beyond their current position.

A most worrisome type of behavior some managers engage in to make themselves appear valuable and thereby needed is an activity I will call credit grabbing. Where this term originated is clouded in mystery, however no other set of words describes this phenomenon so succinctly and accurately.

Credit grabbing is the process of claiming another’s work as their own. Experience shows this carried out with great skill and deft by managers with even the most impressive resumes. A manager, as a course of their duties, often interacts with higher level managers and others of the same rank when their employees are somewhere else doing the legwork. As such, it is easy for a manager to present an employee’s work as their own, and the employee will most likely never even know about it, or if they do, will be powerless to stop it.

To clarify the point even further, a manager will of course present briefings and recommendations based upon the research and work of their employees, and this is completely acceptable, although it is gracious to point out who aided the project by performing the tasks that are the foundation of the effort. However, the action that is negative is when a manager takes a report or document written by an employee, puts their name on it as the author, and circulates it as their own work, proudly proclaiming “I did it” whenever asked. This manager appears to do a lot of the work in his or her department, and is hoping to be needed by the company because of the great volume of deliverables he or she seems to produce from the backs of others who are given no credit.