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Managerial Escalation
Had a class at work today about the social styles communications method. I disagree with the instructor’s guidance that escalation is a proper common technique. I also think the situations would be far and few between where saying something like, “If you don’t go along with this, then I’ll take this to our bosses,” would be an effective mechanism.
The escalation leads to inefficiencies because it typically takes more time than if the individual contributor’s had worked out the issue themselves. There is time involved in communicating the issue to the managers, the time they take to resolve the issue, and the time to communicate it back to the individual contributors. This by itself is incentive enough not to do it, but then there’s also the fallout that exists for future discussions. Each person will be thinking “Oh, I wonder if we’ll have to escalate this one up to the bosses too.” That’ll just lead to more stress because each party won’t have the confidence of knowing if they can solve future issues themselves or not.
I think there’s this myth amongst individual contributors that escalating an issue leads to a magical resolution. An issue can get escalated up one or multiple levels, but eventually either two managers reach consensus with each other or eventually the issue rises up to a common boss that makes an autocratic decision. The only difference between the levels is that the individuals at the higher levels ought to have better communication and conflict resolution abilities than those at the lower levels. But it’s important to note that they’re still resolving the conflict, and it’s not magically getting solved by itself. If the individual contributors can grasp the same communication and conflict resolution abilities that the higher levels can, then they can resolve those issues themselves without having to escalate.
When I have a situation I can’t figure out, what I find that works the best is to put myself in the shoes of a manager that I know makes good decisions. I’ll think “What I do if my boss was on vacation?”, “What would my director do?, or “What would a previous boss I admire have done?”. Usually I find this leads me to a good result. The “what would my previous boss have done” has occasionally let me down in situations where a previous boss would have made a different decision that a current boss, but I still feel it works well.
I think what it comes down to is learning how to effectively utilize as many communication and conflict resolution techniques as possible. The latter part is not something I’m good at, so I’ve recently gone as buying books on the topic. I suppose I can think of a few situations where I’ve escalated, and am glad that I did, as well as a few situations where I didn’t, and later wished that I had. However, I would still view it as something of a fallback mechanism rather than a primary resolution tool. -
The Next Level
I’ve been thinking a lot about how there are 6.5 billion people on this planet, and yet none among them have demonstrated a clear plan for economic recovery. I have determined that such individuals do exist, but they are simply not working on this particular problem. Do you know which group of people have the quantitative optimization skills necessary to solve the global economic crisis? The World of Warcraft players have the ability. These neckbeards have an uncanny ability for optimization problems involving gold and other scarce resources in a competitive and diverse environment. Certain specimens amongst these high level individuals have developed proven track records of accomplishment and resource leveling over the course of many years. They alone would be able to determine the prudent mix of spending cuts, tax increases, quantitative easing, interest rate adjustments, stimulus packages, and hands-off free market enablement. This group of would-be patriots can take our economic system to the next level.
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Approximate Miles Traveled By Form of Transit (last 12 months)
airplane - 51000
personal car - 2500
rental car - 1600
gran turismo 5 - 1474.1
train - 1400
taxi - 1000
bicycle - 519
bus - 80 -
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Isn’t it sad when the domain names for your previous employers don’t even work anymore? According to the whois, Synchrologic.com is still owned by Nokia, but the webserver doesn’t appear to realize it. At least requests for Intellisync.com are still served, even if they’re not sent to the most relevant location.
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I got this postcard in the mail about four months ago. Making fun of ur potential customers? really? lol!
Making fun of your potential customers doesn’t seem like a good business model. Perhaps the joke really is on me though. I liked this enough to take a picture and upload (giving them free advertising). Yet another situation where any publicity is good publicity.
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Price-Rent Ratio
San Jose continues to be one of the worst places to purchase a home:
“Moody’s Analytics, price-rent ratio for third quarter of 2010. As a general rule of thumb, you should often buy when the ratio is below 15 and rent when it’s above 20. If it’s between 15 and 20, lean toward renting”
- San Jose - 32.27
- Manhattan - 28.34
- Atlanta - 12.82
- Metropolitan Area Average - 14.85
- US - 10.42
Also, see the slightly older, but infinitely more readable version at NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/04/20/business/20100420-rent-ratios-table.html
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Happiest city in which to work - San Jose
Based on: “growth opportunities, compensation, benefits, work-life balance, career advancement, senior management, job security and whether the employee would recommend the company to others.” A few highlights:
San Jose - #1
New York - #14
Atlanta - #17
