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Archive for the ‘employment’ Category

Walking away from a gig

Posted in Bruce Byfield, careers, employment, freelancing, jobs, journalism, Personal, revisions, self-employment, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on July 27, 2009| 2 Comments »

If you’re a freelancer, you tend to be haunted by the thought of lacking work. Yet today, against all my freelancing instincts, I walked away from a source of income without having anything to replace it. It was not a step I took easily, but I had no choice if I wanted to keep my self-respect.

The problem wasn’t that the editor was doing their job. I’m a professional, and I have no illusions that my work is perfect or can’t be improved upon. I am incredibly inefficient at editing my own work (although a demon at editing others), and I generally welcome observations that make my wording clearer or more accurate.

Why wouldn’t I? An editor who points out problems before they see print makes me look good.

At the same time, I have worked with half a dozen editors, and I know what editing is generally required to make my work presentable. The number of revisions are roughly the same, no matter who the editor, and rarely require more than half an hours’ work – often less, and almost never more than an hour.

With this editor, though, revisions averaged three or four hours. I admit that he received a few pieces that I wrote while ill or under personal stress and that I should not have submitted in their current shape. However, regardless of the quality of each submission, the editor would almost always return a couple of pages of notes, amounting to a rewrite of the article.

Even if I didn’t have considerable experience, I could have guessed that this amount of revisions was unreasonable. The few times the senior editor looked over a submission, the changes were far fewer, and often minor enough that he made them himself rather than send them to me. But I continued to submit articles, partly because the pay was halfway decent, and partly because I told myself that things would get better once I learned the expected style.

The trouble was, the comments never lessened. Each article I wrote for the editor took twice as long to complete as anything else I wrote. If the revisions weren’t about typos, they were about content.

By my count, about one-third of the comments were legitimate improvements to the article. Another third consisted of explanations of how the editor would have written the article or shibboleths such as insisting that an article should never end in a quote, and one-third nonsense such as labeling a long but grammatical sentence a run-on sentence. I didn’t mind the legitimate improvements, but, to say the least, I felt that I was humoring the editor about the rest just to receive a pay cheque.

Asking other writers, I found that I was not entirely being singled out. Other writers told me that they also expected to waste half a day answering the editor’s notes. But the experience of others showed that the editing process was clearly being used to assert the editor’s authority.

In fact, the criticism was so unrelenting that I began to entertain serious doubts about my writing ability. Once or twice, when I was sick, I was so rattled about the thought of the revisions to follow that what I submitted was definitely below my usual standards. Why bother for quality when you know your article is going to be shredded regardless?

Even so, I might have endured the process while I waited for better times if the work had been regular. But the editor started forgetting my submissions – or so he said – and the one article per week slipped to one article every two weeks. Answers to my queries were delayed so that I had less time to research and write. I strongly suspected that the editor was pressuring me to quit so he wouldn’t have to take any action himself.

This morning, a submission of better than average quality received the same treatment as usual. Annoyed, I queried a couple of points – including one about the slant of the story, which I had based on the senior editor’s request – and received the usual ungracious reply.

Suddenly, I had enough. I was receiving less and less money from the editor anyway, so I had little to lose. Abandoning all plans of waiting until I found replacement work, I emailed saying that I was withdrawing the story and would not be submitting more. With an effort, I refrained from saying anything else.

The reply was a cheerful thanks for my work and best wishes for the future. So far as I was concerned, it was proof that my email had given him exactly what he wanted. Anyone who placed any value on my work, or didn’t want me gone would have asked for reasons.

I still feel nervous and wonder if I have done the right thing. But you know what? I feel so much better now that I’m out of a toxic situation that the challenge hardly daunts me. I’ve already been through far worse.

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Not a team player

Posted in Bruce Byfield, careers, employment, Personal, team players, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , , on June 4, 2009| 15 Comments »

OK, I confess: I am not a team player – at least, not in the sense that the expression is usually used around an office.

This admission is so burdened with nasty connotations that finding the courage to make it has taken most of my adult life. Nobody ever says so in as many words, but the implication is that something is wrong with you if you are not a team player.

In an office setting, not being a team player means that you are uncooperative, unwilling to make sacrifices for the sake of the company for which you work, and probably first in line to be fired. It suggests that something is deeply wrong with you, and that maybe you have other nasty habits as well.

In many ways, the usage reminds me of the admonition by a crowd to be a good sport. In both cases, the implication is that you should conform and do what others want to do, regardless of your own inclinations.

In other words, the threat of being called “not a team player” encourages you to be polite and do what is expected of you. Otherwise, you are letting people (or the company) down.

Such behavior may make daily life easier for a manager. If nothing else, people afraid of having a negative label applied to them can be coerced in endless hours of over-time. But, while I don’t go out of way to be unpleasant, personally I would rather eat sushi made from raw slugs that conform for no better reason than someone else’s convenience.

More importantly, from my observations the sort of behavior implied when the concept of a team player is raised is the exact opposite of what you want when you need to accomplish something.

When I was growing up, I did my share of team sports, mostly soccer and rugby. Perhaps, I was lucky, but, at the time, the pseudo-military atmosphere that prevails in football had no place in those sports. Nor could it; you can easily memorize a few moves from a standard position, but soccer and rugby both require a more active sense of smarts that can adjust to an ever-changing situation.

In such fast-moving games, the last thing you want is conformists. Instead, what you want to know is that the people on your team can think for themselves – that they will be in the position for you to pass the ball to them because they have anticipated what is about to happen on the field. You relied on your team mates’ competence, not their dedication to the team.

In my favorite sport, long distance running, this lesson was even more obvious. Sure, there were cross-country teams and points were tallied for each school at a track meet. At times, someone who was slower might even run interference to help a faster team member break away from the pack. But, mostly, you were alone with your own training and sense of strategy. If your team won, it was because those on it were prepared and alert.

As an adult, I find the same lesson in the free and open source software (FOSS) community. Operating systems like GNU/Linux or applications like Firefox, or Apache have not excelled because they were made in an organization of conformists. Instead, they have succeeded because their development model assumes the competence of those involved. For the most part, people coordinate their work with everyone else, then do it largely on their own and return it to the community for peer review. It is this system of individuals coordinating their separate work that is the secret of such projects’ successes.

A group of team players in the ordinary use of the term needs to work much harder to achieve the same level of excellence as such projects – assuming, that is, they can reach it at all. As for innovation, forget it. So-called team players simply aren’t geared for it. Nor are they likely to have the degree of personal responsibility and discipline needed to work in such a loosely-knit way.

When I have worked in offices that emphasize teamwork, I have always found that my efforts to achieve excellence swamped by the need to appear loyal and to swallow my opinions and interrupt my concentration with endless meetings. Team-players are skilled in jingoism and giving the appearance of getting work done, but the chances of them achieving anything beyond the bare specifications is minimal. When they do, you almost always find that the source of the excellence is someone on the fringes of the team who works on their own as much as possible.

If that is what being a team player means, then I, for one, want nothing to do with the label. To me, it is a code word for mediocrity. I achieve more personal satisfaction – and, in the end, help those around me more (including my employers) – if I work on my own with consultation as needed, and can trust those around me to do the same.

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How I survived round two of the recession

Posted in Bruce Byfield, careers, employment, Free Software, freelancing, layoffs, open source, Personal, recession, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on February 13, 2009| Leave a Comment »

For a freelancer, complacency can mean loss of income. This is a lesson that freelancers can never hear too many times – and one that I apparently need repeated more than most. A few weeks after I blogged about how I had managed to replace the income I lost with the closing of Linux.com with other assignments, I found some of those assignments failing, and suddenly found myself scrambling to replace them.

Fortunately, the job-hunting skills I’d learned as a communications and marketing consultant soon paid off.

As before, basic survival wasn’t an issue. We had income for basic survival, and, since we own our townhouse and have never lived beyond our means, we had no worries about debt. All the same, the situation was disconcerting. I thought I’d solved the income problem.

The problem arose because of two clients. In the first case, the client had at first seemed willing to commit to two stories per week from me. However, after a few weeks, they confessed what I had already concluded from their actions: That they were unable or unwilling to take more than one story per week.

In the second cases, the editor forgot that they had agreed to take two stories from me in February, and budgeted the money instead for articles from other people. Since this was a short term arrangement, it wasn’t as important as the first one, but it was still the first time that an editor had reneged on me for any reason, so it came as a shock. For one thing, I rather liked the editor, and preferred to think well of them. For another, I had counted on having a month to figure out a replacement for that income. Coming on top of the other case and some personal bad news that I choose to keep private, it felt like one damned thing after another.

For a day or so, the situation got to me. I even went so far as to consider revising my resumes and looking for straight work. Despite the recession, the work for writers, editors, and instructors of my experience were plentiful in the Vancouver area, but it all seemed dull and routine compared to what I have accustomed to in the last four years.

Then common sense took me by the scruff of the neck. There were still plenty of outlets for free and open source software articles that I hadn’t got around to trying. I spent an afternoon on the Internet learning about the potential clients (something no freelancer or job-hunter should ever neglect), and prioritizing them according to how their needs compared with my areas of knowledge, the size of their audience (which is often found on pages for advertisers), and, where possible, how much they pay per article.

The next morning, I started phoning. I could have emailed, and my queries easier on my nerves, but, for serious business conversations, there’s still nothing as direct as a phone call. Hearing a voice is personal in a way that email or even chat isn’t, which makes a phone call a way to distinguish yourself from anyone else and have yourself remembered.

To my surprise, I appear to have been lucky the first time out. Details are still being worked out, but I expect to be doing an online blog and a print column, as well as contributing other articles.

You’ll have to imagine me dancing around my living room and pumping my fist in the air (or maybe you shouldn’t; it isn’t a pretty site).
But, while I’m glad of the respite, I hope I’ve learned my lesson. I can’t say that I don’t make the same mistake twice, but I hope to say that I won’t make it three times. I still have other a prioritized list of markets (something I should have readied a long time ago), and, if any other client disappears on me, I’m ready to find replacements.

Given the current economic conditions, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ll have a use for that list again in the next few months. But, so far, I can still repeat what I said in my earlier post: Freelancers are better equipped to survive the recession than most – and should generally survive better.

Now, though, I would add: A few job-hunting skills don’t hurt, either.

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How I survived round one of the recession

Posted in Bruce Byfield, careers, employment, Free Software, freelancing, layoffs, open source, Personal, recession, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on January 3, 2009| 2 Comments »

Six weeks ago, I wrote that freelancers were better equipped than full-timers to survive a recession, because they were more accustomed to looking for work. At the time, I had only the vaguest suspicions that I would be putting my confident words to the test less than ten days later. Linux.com, which was buying most of my articles, was going along much the same as usual, and, and, because SourceForge, its parent company, is publicly traded, I knew it had money in the bank. If anyone were recession-proof, then surely I was. And, in the end, I was right, although not in the way that I had expected.

By freelancing standards, I had grown complacent. Ordinarily, I try to diversify my sources of income. But I was already writing the maximum number of stories that I could write per month without increasing my work hours, so I hadn’t done so as much as I might. Instead, I had allowed myself to become heavily dependent on a single buyer.

Imagine my surprise, then, when my main buyer suddenly stopped buying stories – just in time for Christmas.

After I picked myself up out of the bomb crater, my first reaction was relief that I had at least diversified enough that I could cover my monthly expenses. But I wouldn’t have much left over, and I didn’t feel like giving up my newly acquired art habit, even if it is a luxury.

As I exchanged a flurry of emails and IRC conversations with my fellow writers, I realized that I had to move at once. Quickly putting together a mental list of the most likely buyers for articles on free and open source software, I sent out some queries – not detailing what was happening, but simply saying that some slots in my writing schedule had opened up.

The results, to say the least, were gratifying. Five hours later, I had replaced 85% of the income I had obtained each month from my main buyer. Within three days, I had not only replaced it all, but had done so with a reduced work load. I didn’t even have to go through half my list of potential buyers, although I still might.

Of course, for the past month, I’ve been kept busy getting to know new editors and their ways of doing things. Also, there was paper work — all the more so because I’m a Canadian writing for American-based sites. But all that’s a small price to pay for self-preservation.

Am I lucky? I am painfully aware that I am, especially when I had let myself become so comfortable. But, to some extent, I made my own luck. I still had enough of a freelancer’s instinct to know what I had to do, and that I had to do it fast before anyone else did. And, apparently, despite the vocal minority that like to badmouth me, I seem to have developed a reasonably good reputation – in fact, some of that reputation seems founded on the grounds that anyone badmouthed by certain people must be all right.

Still, my escape was far too close for me to be self-congratulatory. To some extent, I’m still in panic mode.

I don’t know if Linux.com will still be a market for me when the dust clears. But, just now, I doubt that I will return to becoming so dependent on it – or any other single outlet. More than anything else, I am coming out of the last month with my belief intact: As a freelancer, I really was equipped to handle recession.

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Should you hire a career coach?

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, career choices, employment, jobs, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , on December 19, 2008| 1 Comment »

If you’re one of the thousands who have been laid off in the last few months, you might be tempted to use a career coach to help you in your job search. But whether that’s a good idea depends on whom you hire as a coach, and what you expect to get out of the experience.

Hiring coaches is difficult, because in most places – and probably everywhere – anyone who wants to can set up as a career coach. No professional or regulatory body exists for the job. Nor does any recognized form of accreditation (having taken a course or two doesn’t count).

The only criterion you have for judging career coaches is their reputation. A good place to start is with an Internet search in which you keep an eye out for complaints to consumer organizations or better business bureaus. But even that may not tell the whole story if the coach is part of a larger organization or franchise, because a business record in one area may mean nothing in another area.

You may also want to arrange a preliminary meeting, and decide whether or not you trust the coach, but don’t imagine that you can necessarily tell someone who is fraudulent. After all, a fraud probably has more experience conning people than you have detecting them. Probably your best bet is to work with someone who comes recommended by a friend or family member who has been their client, and whose judgment you trust. However, if that isn’t possible, ask a potential coach for references — and check them.

As you screen a possible coach, be on the lookout for exaggerated claims. Does the coach claim to have methods no one else has? Do they guarantee results? Put you through a screening process, then tell you that you’ve made the cut? Use high pressure tactics? Any of these signs may indicate dishonesty or, at the very least, a greater interest in taking your money than in helping you.

Just as importantly, be very clear what a coach does for you. If you are expecting someone to do all the work for you, or to pull a genuine miracle out of the desk drawer for you, you are going to be disappointed in your association.

Basically, a coach can do two things for you. The first is to update your sense of the job market, and to help you prepare for your search. A coach can give you advice about how to arrange a resume to best effect, help you practice interviewing, critique your clothing and manner, and, if you have chosen well, give you a better sense of the job market in your areas of expertise than you have. In most cases, they will tell you about the effectiveness of networking and informational interviews, but the simple statistic that the average person needs 30-40 informational interviews to land a job is enough to tell you that the real work has to be done by you. A coach can prepare you, but if you don’t cooperate with their job search program, then you are wasting your money.

The second thing that a career coach can do for you is to serve as an advisor, answering the questions that arise during your job search, analyzing your account of your experiences, and suggesting ways that you can approve next time. Since they are constantly thinking about such matters with a number of people, they should be able to give you better advice than most people. In other words, they can help you focus your efforts and learn from them – but the effort is still up to you, and not the coach.

Hiring a coach is like taking a class; just as you can learn the subject matter of a class by yourself, you can learn what a coach can teach you through a library or experience. In both cases, entering into a formal agreement forces you to become organized, and can help you to learn more systematically.

But, if you are not ready to put in the effort, or imagine that the formal agreement is an end in itself rather than ongoing guidance, you are going to be disappointed in the result – and, because of the lack of formal qualifications for career coaches, quite possibly cheated.

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Using conversational hooks in networking and job hunting

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, careers, employment, Personal, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , , on December 5, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Even if you’re an extrovert, meeting new people takes energy. To reduce the required energy, whenever I’m networking or at a business meeting, I like to come equipped with at least one conversational hook – a detail about me that make people curious and give them something to talk about when they approach me.

The term is borrowed from the writer’s idea of a hook, or first sentence that makes people want to read more. For example, when Charles Dickens started A Christmas Carol with, “Marley was dead to begin with,” he hoped that readers would be intrigued about why he would mention the fact. More subtly, when Jane Austen began Pride and Prejudice with “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,” she is announcing that her subject is courtship, hoping that it will interest them (and also, as you soon find out, being ironic, since the last thing that either Bingley or Darcy are thinking of at the start of the novel is getting married).

A conversational hook works the same way. Just as a literary hook lures you into reading, a conversational hook is designed to make others think that you are worth spending time with. It’s not as extreme as an eccentricity. Nor is it a pose, because, to be successful, a conversational hook needs to be backed up by the ability to talk about it. Rather, it is an expression of your individuality that attracts attention.

A conversational hook can be as simple as a T-shirt. When I am at a developers’ conference – and, sometimes, just on the street – My Linux Journal T-shirt, with the slogan, “In a world without fences, who needs gates?” (a reference, of course, to Bill Gates and Windows) is sure to evoke a laugh. And, once you have shared a laugh, talking with each other becomes easier.

More recently, I have found my three inch copper bracelet by Tsimshian artist Henry Green to be another conversational hook. Larger than usual, made of a metal that you rarely seen in jewelry, and featuring a stunning design, the bracelet offers all sorts of topics that people can use to approach me. First Nations people, especially artists, are especially interested in it, but the interest cuts across all sorts of demographics. One friendly acquaintance who has watched too much Doctor Who calls it my chronoplate, while others ask if I am wearing it because I believe that copper helps relieve arthritis. It helps that the bracelet is more suitable for formal occasions than a T-shirt, too.

You can use the same idea to make yourself stand out on a resume. Although I maintain several different resumes, I always include two or three lines under the heading of “Interests.” Currently, the section reads, “Running; parrots; punk folk music; Northwest Coast art; history, science fiction, and 19th century novels; Linux.” This summary not only says a lot about me and positions me – I hope – as a well-rounded individual who is worth interviewing.

In addition, when I am called into a job interview or consulting session, it gives other people a starting point. I have lost track of the number of times people have begun by asking me what punk folk music is, and many other meetings begin with an exchange of stories about running or science fiction. And I still remember the forty-five minute interview that consisted of five minutes of talk about the contract, and forty exchanging cute stories about our parrots.

Conversational hooks work because most people are nervous meeting new people. By giving them something to talk about, you set them at ease. In doing so, you generally create a favorable first impression – and first impressions, as you probably know, are frequently the basis for the impression that people take away from a meeting. Not only can you help yourself by creating hooks that draw other people in, but you can be on the lookout for hooks that others may be consciously or unconsciously offering.

Either way, you’ll find that conversational hooks are a great way to take the nervousness out of meeting people for everyone.

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Why freelancers are best-equipped to survive a recession

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, career choices, careers, corporatelife, employment, freelancers, Personal, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , , , , , on November 22, 2008| 13 Comments »

Earlier this week, The Globe and Mail ran an article about freelancers who were considering finding full-time work in response to the recession-cum-depression of the last couple of months. Being a long-time freelancer myself – and someone who has never been happier than when working for himself – I found some wry amusement in the assumption that freelancing is riskier than full-time employment. Not only do I believe that freelancing is generally safer than full-time employment, but I suggest that freelancers are better equipped to weather the uncertain economy.

Admittedly, a recession is a bad moment to begin a freelance career, if only because so many other people may be attempting the same change. Obviously, too, a freelancer’s ability to survive depends on what services they offer; for instance, if you offer web design services, in hard times people might be tempted to put off improvements and changes to their web pages as non-essential.

However, in general, freelancers have distinct advantages in troubled times:

  • Freelancers are already established: As full-timers are laid off and try to support themselves on freelancing, established freelancers already have the contracts and – most importantly – the reputations to keep themselves employed. Many of them have an established customer base, and they can focus on assignments rather than on marketing themselves – a process that usually takes a few months.
  • Freelancers are more versatile: Full-time employees are generally slotted into narrow specialties. By contrast, freelancers can offer new, related services as the opportunity or need arises. For example, if you are a technical writer who finds that clients are putting off updating their documentation, perhaps you can branch out into public relations or graphic design.
  • Freelancers are used to working on multiple contracts at the same time: While full-timers often have the luxury of concentrating on one project at a time, most freelancers juggle multiple projects at the same time. Part of the reason may be freelancers are so afraid of being without income that they often overbook themselves. However, an even larger part of the reason is that they don’t always find a single project that brings in enough income by itself. A recession simply makes this situation even more likely. So, in this sense, the habits of the average freelancer become a useful survival mechanism during a recession.
  • Freelancers have established social networks: In any sort of job-hunting, connections are important. But, while full-timers often neglect networking because of their false sense of security, freelancing is like constantly looking for work. The result is that freelancers may be prepared to replace work lost to the recession with other assignments.
  • Freelancers are better prepared psychologically for losing work: Many full-timers invest a lot of their self-image in their employment. When they lose their position, they are devastated. But freelancers do not nurse the full-timers’ dream of a job for life. They expect to work on many contracts during their careers. So, when one contract is canceled, it means very little to freelancers – unlike full-timers, they are not devastated. While they may regret the loss, freelancers know that some work will never materialize or be canceled, even in good times.
    In other words, a recession is only a freelancer’s regular situation intensified. They know how to deal with the situation, and don’t need to change their attitudes to survive – unlike full-timers.

I’m not surprised that The Globe and Mail could find freelancers who were considering full-time employment, but I suspect that they are in a minority. Although all the freelancers I know are alert to the economic situation, they seem reasonably confident of their ability to survive it. Unlike full-timers, they find little new in troubled times.

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Unexpected holidays

Posted in Bruce Byfield, employment, leisure time, Personal, time off, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , , on October 30, 2008| Leave a Comment »

As a freelance writer, I’m committed to a certain number of articles each month. I often have to work far too many weekends and evenings to finish them all, but, once I finish them, my work for the month is done. This month, I finished my work at about noon today, and even had time for one extra article, so the next day and a half are an unexpected holiday.

Maybe I have too strong a work ethic, but I find something luxurious and wicked in this unlooked-for time. Maybe it’s a lingering feeling from school, when such time meant that you either had a doctor’s appointment or were skipping out.

It’s not as though I do anything special with such holidays. This afternoon, all I did was get my hair cut, then head to the gym and make a few phone calls when I returned home. Tomorrow, the sum total of my intentions is to stop by the video store and maybe do a bit of early Christmas shopping downtown. Hardly epic stuff, but stuff that my schedule usually doesn’t give me time to enjoy.

Not having to worry about juggling deadlines, making appointments, or any of the usual obligations of my working day removes the pressure on me. The pressure is self-inflicted, since I manage my own workload, and compared to that of many officer workers, it’s slight. In fact, often, I’m not even aware that it’s there. But, once I stop, I notice its absence.

Free of pressure, I take my time. My errands are not slotted into my schedule, but vague destinations that I can saunter towards at half my usual speed. Like one of our parrots, I can allow myself to be distracted along the way.

And, as I meander, whistling, I look at the hurry that everybody else is in, and wonder why they look so tired and tense. An overdose of Starbucks Ventes, maybe?

Maybe the main reason I enjoy these unexpected holidays is my awareness of how brief and uncertain they are. Some months, I don’t get them at all, and I’m left scrambling to submit my last articles before midnight on the last day of the month. And, even when I do get them, they barely make up for the work I do outside of normal business hours.

All too soon, I know that another month will roll around, and I’ll be contemplating another bout of the same routine. But, for that half day, that two days – however much I finish before the end of the month – my time is my own, and I can slow down. Then I feel smugly serene – and very, very lucky to have organized my life so that I occasionally get such windfalls.

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On hearing that a former employer has closed

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, corporatelife, employment, humor, officework, Personal, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , , , , on September 9, 2008| 1 Comment »

The other week, I heard that a former employer had gone out of business. I reacted with the same pleasure that an octogenarian might feel on reading the name of an unpleasant former colleague in the obituaries. I was glad to see the company go, and my only surprise was that it had crawled along as long as it had. I had been expecting to see it go under for years.

As you might guess, I was not particularly happy there. I used to take long walks at lunch, regardless of the weather, just to get away from the place, and would amuse myself by composing words to a parody of “Chantilly Lace” that I called “Genteelly Bored.”

Part of my unhappiness was the circumstances. It was my first full-time position since the dot-com crash. After being one of the powers at two different companies, I felt demoted to be working as a technical writer again, no matter how often I told myself that no honest living was shameful. But I felt massively under-challenged, and chafed at having to take directions, although I remained polite.

But a larger part of the problem was that, having been a leader (of what quality I’m not sure), I knew that the company officers and executives were border-line competence at best. The CEO was not only fond of purges, which inevitably included people with key knowledge, but also of inflicting the latest management fads on the company. He was fond of regular, excruciating company meetings at which he kept showing the same slides over and over. When I left, he was trying retreats at which select members of the company would discuss a book on the management best-seller lists – a move which instantly divided the company into the privileged and the under-appreciated. He never did seem to understand that he was sending mixed signals, and, when I briefly shared an office with him due to overcrowding, he used to wonder why no one was passionate about the company.

The other executives were no better. The vice-president of toadyism, as I called the CEO’s right hand man, was infamous for making decisions without bothering to gather necessary information.

Another executive, a fundamentalist Christian, tried to take me to task for using, “Does anal-retentive have a hyphen?” on my screen saver. He thought it obscene, and was put out when I suggested that he had better things to do than chastise me over trivia and I refused to apologize on the grounds that I had done nothing wrong.

Then there was the testing manager, a little man who decorated his office in unread books and inspirational posters, and would spend hours designing spreadsheets with the largest color palette that I have ever seen. He worked long hours, and like to call meetings with me just before I was leaving for home. But at least he didn’t last as long as his probation.

“Blind leading the blind” was the phrase that kept occurring to me when I had to deal with any of these characters. But although interacting with them was bad enough, what was especially hard to handle was the fact that I had enough experience (and enough memories of my own incompetence) to know that they were mismanaging the company, and making what could only be a marginal business at best a loser. I discovered that to see incompetence that you know how to correct, yet to be able to do or say nothing is one of the most uncomfortable mental states possible.

Still, I shouldn’t complain. If I hadn’t been so uncomfortable, I wouldn’t have started trying to write a book on OpenOffice.org. The book was never published, but my efforts over the fifteen months I was at the company have since repaid my effort many times over as I cannibalized the chapters for articles. I also started doing a couple of other articles per month, and I still remember the pleasure when I had earned enough from articles to buy my new computer. There was another short contract between my work at this company and my transition to full-time journalist, but if I hadn’t been so bored, I might never have done the ground work for a career change. So I can’t say that the company didn’t do me an unintentional favor.

Still, I wish there had been a wake. I would have attended, if only to dance on the coffin.

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Save me from passionate leaders

Posted in Bruce Byfield, bureaucracy, careers, corporatelife, employment, leadership, management, officework, Personal, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 15, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Today, I was interviewing someone who stated that any company or free software needed a leader who was passionate about the work.

The idea was that, being a leader, they could quickly make the decisions necessary for the smooth running of the company, and that, being passionate about the work, they would make desirable decisions – or, at the very least, spare their subordinates the problem of making no decision at all, which the interviewee saw as often worse than making a wrong decision.

Given what I know of the interviewee, I wasn’t surprised to hear this belief expressed. All the same, I was amused that, shortly before the interview, I had read a new release announcing that a former employer, who also believed in being a passionate leader (perhaps he reads the same books on management as the interviewee) had just sold 95% of his company after five years of trying to make it consistently profitable. And if that is not a sign of bad leadership, what is?

As the interviewee expounded his theory, I couldn’t help thinking that you can passionately make the wrong decision at least as often as the right one. If anything, if you push logic aside in favor of inspiration, you’re probably more inclined to make wrong decisions.

Also, although I kept silent – interviews not being about me, I strongly believe – I couldn’t help thinking that, nine times out of ten, when people talk about leadership, they are viewing themselves as the leaders in question. What other people might think of the arrangement they are expounding hardly enters into their consideration. The assumption always seems to be that non-leaders will automatically follow.

I suppose that some people might exist who want a leader to make decisions for them. Or, at least, if they do exist, such people might explain neo-conservatism. But, I’ve never met them. The most apathetic and most obedient alike always seem jaded or cynical about their situation, if you can get them talking in a place where they feel safe.

For the most part, I suspect that people are not looking for a leader so much as a sense that their input into a decision matters. Nothing can be more irritating to someone with specialized knowledge than to find that their experience has been ignored in the decision-making.

I remember one long, hot summer when I was working on a design and writing project with a company. Whenever we held meetings, the CEO would arrive forty minutes late. He would then spend the next twenty minutes vetoing all the decisions the rest of us had made before his arrival – so far as I can see, simply because he felt like asserting his authority. Those of us who were consultants soon got into the habit of being late ourselves, and of not talking about anything to do with the project until the CEO arrived.

Needless to say, we were fuming, partly about the waste of time, but partly because our suggestions, which we believed were in the best interest of the company, were being ignored.

Very likely, we were sometimes wrong n our decisions, but, given our experience, we were almost certainly right more often than the CEO, who had no relevant expertise in the project – only a passion to have things his own way.

Such experiences explain why, whenever someone talks about visionary leadership, I start getting very apprehensive (at least when I have to endure it; when I don’t, I just shake my head). Somehow, business in the twenty-first century has got hold of the idea that leadership is some sort of natural trait or at least something that is an end in itself.

The idea reminds me of people who believe that a writer simply needs to know how to write, and has no need for expertise on their subject – in both cases, the odds of poor performance increase to near certainty, probably because so much time is spent disguising ignorance and inability.

Personally, I think leadership is simpler than that. These days, I tend to avoid situations where leadership arise, having decided that I have no particular wish to lead, and that I most definitely do not want to led.

However, in the past, leadership roles continually came my way – probably due the wrong-headed belief that if you are skilled in one area, you are somehow fit to lead. When I could not avoid such roles, however, I quickly learned that they were not about me, or making me feel good.

To me, leadership decisions were simply a matter of problem solving: I gathered what information I could in the time allotted, consulting people when I needed to, made a decision, then moved on to the next matter needing my attention. But, then, I’ve never thought that any leadership that wasn’t hands-on was worth a damn, anyway.

To this day, I have no idea how effective a leader I was. Nor am I likely to find out now. But it seems to me that there is far less to the role than those who aspire to it like to pretend.

Passion? Vision? So far as I am concerned, passion is for martyrs, and visions are for saints. I’ve always been aware that I wasn’t so exalted, and that I had a job to do.

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