how little managers understand the moviations of their people.

Most of the managers think they know their people, but do they really?

1. One manager was shocked to know that half of the people in his department did not know how to book a conference room using the voice dialing system. How would they know if no one has ever showed them how.

2. the next example comes from people using the normal email distribution list to talk about non-work activities. Everybody wanted a separate forum for this, but when a news group was created hardly anybody signed up as members. it turned out that most of the people did not know how to configure a news reader. the manager just assumed that everyone knew.This was not the only reason, just an empty group does not make it interesting for people to sign up, if there were some interesting discussion posted to this mailing listed and then peopel were asked to join,it would have been a successful launch of the new service.

3. People are moved around from project to project in big corporations so ruthlessly that their personal interests are never addressed. For example in one high profile project that was barely stying above the water, management decided to replace a young inexperienced person with two people who were more experienced. the reality was that this youngster was the one who was keeping the project afloat and his older college was the dead weight on the project. This information was available to the management, but they moved the younger fellow to a more mundane project without asking if he would be interested. Immediately the youngster started searching for new job and left this company for a startup and a senior position. This is not an isolated case. I have seen lots of occasions where a senior person is given higher priority just because it is more difficult to higher someone like him and the company looses a promising talent.

:)