It's Going Great

Why Executives Hate the IT Department

One of the ways that Deltas and Gammas demonstrate to their superiors that they are completely unsuitable for positions of leadership is when they fail to follow orders on the basis of their inability to recognize that the organization’s priorities are more important than their personal sense of priority.

Remember, the primary responsibility of middle management is to implement the directives of upper management. But once you show that you are incapable of even following direct orders, it is completely obvious to everyone with any management experience that there is not a snowball’s chance in Hell that you are capable of handling the responsibility of middle management.

This is one of the reasons that Smart Boys never get promoted, no matter how smart they are, no matter how expert they are in their subjects, and no matter how good they are at their jobs. Conversely, it’s also why inept women who don’t even understand what the product often have no trouble advancing up the management ladder. Because while they may not understand what the company or its products actually do, they understand the rules of the organizational game.

The causes of the behavior may be different; Deltas are too focused on their specific job responsibilities to care about what appear to be the senseless vagaries of their clueless boss’s orders while Gammas are solipsistically concentrated on demonstrating how special they are in one context or another. But the results are the same and they are suboptimal.

If you’re a low-level employee, your one and only priority is to do what your boss tells you to do. If you’re even halfway good, you can probably accomplish that in less than half the time allotted for it, so instead of slacking off, playing Solitaire, and surfing the Internet, use that time to address the additional issues that you see that will be useful to your department, your superior, and the organization.

That’s the best of both worlds. You make your superior happy, you get your job done, and you demonstrate that you are capable of moving up the org chart.