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by Laurent Bossavit.
Original Post: The Permission Market
Feed Title: Incipient(thoughts)
Feed URL: http://bossavit.com/thoughts/index.rdf
Feed Description: You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all alike. You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all different.
Among the many irritating behaviors of bad managers I've been exposed to, one that's close to the top of the Top 10 list is "Don't talk to the customer directly - I'll deal with them." I've recently formed a tentative explanation for this behavior, based on something my kids keep doing.
No, you can't have a banana", I tell baby Mika who's already had two desserts previous to that. "Eating this banana is likely to make you sick, so I'd prefer you didn't do that. Please put the banana back."
Baby Mika is smart enough to have observed that the power structure around the house features two loci of authority. So he shops around for authority which will look more favorably on his project of the moment. And gets to eat his banana, because Mom (three rooms away, out of earshot of the previous conversation in which Mika was denied) was disposed to grant permission for a lower amount of whiny insistence (babies' main currency in the permission market) than I was.
I conjecture that this kind of thing goes on in organizations as well as in families, though I have no formal record of similar observations in work contexts - my eye for such things is sharper now than it was. If it does, it might well explain a desire to control and limit workers' channels of communication to anyone with enough authority to counteract the manager's own instructions.
Of course that doesn't work, even with babies - much less, I'd expect, with adults. I don't tell my kids that they shouldn't talk to Mom. Instead I talk to Mom, and make sure we work out a common position. And both of us make sure to communicate a lot about what the kids did, ate, wore, and so on.
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