Feedback Not Required

“You’re great at what you do and that’s why we hired you. But we don’t need any feedback from you on the best way to do your job. We’ll tell you how to do it, you just…. you know….. do it.”

That’s essentially what gets said to us on a daily basis here. It’s funny because when things are running smooth and waves are calm, our team can talk with our boss as a group and toss around the words Restructure and Reorganize all day long, and the boss is with us, and his boss is with us too. But like too many companies, we never execute those ideas. We go right back into maintenance mode for another few months until we toss around the R words all over again.

That is until a client freaks out and threatens to leave. Things always seem to pick up the pace at that point. Maintenance tasks are pushed to the side. Emergency meetings are held at regular intervals and that faint glimmer of hope that represents putting in place much needed infrastructure changes is now a fireball of possibility. Unfortunately, it fades just as fast it came.

You see, they don’t want the big scale changes you’ve been dreaming about. They don’t want to adopt the newest technologies. They don’t care about optimization. All they care about is healing the wound, placing a band-aid on the sore and giving the client immediate resolution. So you wind up implementing a 5th of what you wanted to do, or maybe even less. You end up creating several more strands of spaghetti to pile on top of the pile of you already have that would take years to unravel.

And once the client is appeased……… you move back into maintenace mode. Only now, you have that much more to maintain. And that glimmer of hope seems that much more dim.

When does it end?