I recently got to feel the weight of social conditioning in the enterprise. I was asked to temporary (three weeks to be precise) fill in in a somewhat managerial position. I started with the idea that I have great confidence in my team mates and that therefore I would not need to do much in this interim period aside from fielding a few e-mails and showing up in a few meetings (I was even spared the administrative burden !).

I soon discovered however that I was trapped in the conventional thinking that is continuously hammered into us that people will not do what they should and that, as a result, if you are delegating the work, you should also verify it very thoroughly. Even knowing it is not good (see Peopleware for convincing arguments) I still felt compelled to do it. Worse, I had to refrain myself from over doing it and try to be more supportive than prescriptive !

The awful thing is that it is an attitude I don’t like as a subordinate, it is something that does not happen when the relationship is truly a peer to peer one. I came to realise the reason I was trapped in this attitude is that I felt singled out as the individual responsible for the outcome. It did not feel like a team responsibility but my responsibility.

That is what I would call the management trap. The illusion that things are at stake for you personally rather than the group. It is the social trap that we use everyday to ensure a control structure rather than a collaborative one.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 31st, 2008 at 11:38 pm and is filed under Agile, Nag. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.