Saturday, May 30, 2009

It Depends On Who You Talk To

My boss is sharp. Really, he knows what he's doing. For the first time in some years, I have felt for the past 24 months like I had a bit of a safety net if I made a mistake. He's an unashamed ladder-climber, but I can live with that. He's enrolled in some developmental program for potential directors or even executive officers, very prestigious. The program includes all sorts of personality profiling to determine an individual's strengths and weakness, as well as an awareness of the personality types of others they work with. The benefits of this sort of training for a reasonably young but skilled worker can be enormous.

There's one thing the program never does: talk to any of the people who work for the corporate shooting star. All the input that could be gained, valuable feedback over the real difficulties and frailties of the someday executive... nobody knows those warts better than the grunts who have to do the front line tasks. Sure, you have to watch out for disgruntled types who have an axe to grind, but isn't it possible that if you go back far enough you'd find that there is a reason for the axe grinding?

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