Another Day

Another day at the office goes along.

 

The day started with a three hour meeting. Hopefully there will not be any more meeting for today, atleast that way, I can get some serious work done from my end. There is definetely a limit to the number of meetings you should organise, but aparently my boss doesnt believe in any such dictum. He just loves calling and attending meetings, and as far as i can see, thats pretty much all that he does.

 

I am feeling this more and more. I have concerns about the way he is running things all around. I think he is making too many arbitrary decisions without properly communicatng it to the concerned people. Well, thats ok with me - i mean, that should not be my problem but hte problem of the guy whose toes he is stepping on. No..no..thats not worrying me. As the team leader, he makes these decisions, but asks us to implement them. Thats when I start getting cold feet. And that too, without properly even communicating it with us, whom he expects to implement things.

 

Let me start at the beginning itself - so that I can clarify it to myself. I think I started loosing trust on him, when he made decisions, asked us to follow them (which we did, hardly too much to ask), but later backed off and reversed his stand when faced with pressure from others who were affected by it - saying that he had said "thing y", while we just interpreted it as "thing x" or something like that. So, he basically put the blame on us and our lack of understanding of what he expected of us. Thats not even an excuse, because if you are a team leader, then you are also accountable for the actions of the team as a whole and of its individual members, and cannot get away blaming it on "communication glitches" and "inadequecies". Thats when I could go no longer believing what he says - because he might as well just change his stance (believe me - it does not take a lot to convince him of anything and then again counter-convince him 5 minutes later!!! :D) and then blame the others for it.

 

So, now, its reached a stage, where the "team" idea is defeated because my peers or me dont trust him anymore. I dont trust him to back me up on something or even atleast back himself on what he decided or said. Thats the whole issue. But that hasnt stopped him from jumping the gun and romping around making changes and taking decisions which go beyond our team and has dependencies and impacts on other team and lot of other things. And then when they come back with issues, well, he just backs off.

 

Thus, the situation is such now that I insist on getting everything in writing from him. But I have noticed that he is very dimplomatic with this and usually writes it in very general terms and deals non-specifically.

 

Anyway, lets see how it goes. I frankly dont know what to do with a host of issues that are cropping up but I cant resolve because he is not ready to make a decision in writing (he is always ready wiht a tit-tat answer, but will never writes a mail communicating it).

 

As a simple eg: I had some issue, that was raised by a couple of people and required a decision beyond my authority and so I sent him a mail to escalate the issue, so that I could have a proper directive from him. Only that he just walked up to me some time later on and said - do this..this..this...etc..but never replied to the mail, not even when I insisted so that the others involved could be kept in the loop. He at his level can make such a decision and communicate it, but I at my level cannot!! Thats my he is my boss!

 

Its a strange conundrum, and me and my colleagues are intrigued by it. We all know that this is certainly an issue now, but we dont know how to solve it!