PUTTIN' COLOGNE ON THE RICKSHAW

We’ve all seen them, the infamous job description. Job descriptions are the most useless things in modern business. Why, because they don’t define the actual job duties that the employee will be expected to perform (or the abuse they’ll have to endure).

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if, just once, an organization laid their cards on the table and wrote a job description that told the truth?

So let’s look at the job description that we’d all really like to see. An honest one; one that tells it like it really is. It’s for an all too real typical management position.

Job Purpose:

Meet organization wide and department objectives with little support from upper management in the way of resources, budget and manpower.

Job Skills and Abilities:

Perform as if one of the A-players (the best-of-the-best) all the while accepting mediocre pay and benefits.

Be adept at convincing yourself and other people that your sociopathic behavior is, in fact, good leadership practice.

Recruit staff by being able to determine if a job candidate is the ‘best-of-the-best’ based on a five minute resume review and a half hour interview yet not be able to recognize the best-of-the-best qualities in people who have worked for you for years.

Be effectively able to suck-up to management by exhibiting well developed sycophantic skills and behaviors.

Accomplish results through command and control management techniques, dictating unrealistic job expectations and by pedantically micromanaging the every move of your subordinates.

Have the ability to subjectively appraise employees, with no remorse, against nebulous skills factors through an archaic performance review process.

Coach, mentor, and coddle a few employees that are self-styled heroes who will serve as your trusted sycophants.

Be adept at practicing plausible deniability. Effectively practice only half the accountability equation by always focusing blame on subordinates. Be able to hold everyone accountable except yourself.

Enforce archaically oppressive systems, policies, procedures, and productivity standards, disciplining any employee who violates them.

Be a workaholic willing to forfeit all work-life balance and have no qualms about requiring the same level of effort from subordinates.

Exhibit no remorse when conducting a lay-off, or RIF.

Able to soothsay the future to avoid any and all surprises.

Be able to multi-task as many useless things at once as management can identify. Do this despite the known fact that to be successful the optimum number of simultaneous projects is three.

Always complete your action items on time regardless of whether the action is important to the organization’s business success.

Be able to establish pedantic tactical departmental goals derived from a vague and outdated organizational vision/mission statement.

Be able to spout platitudes about management’s core values all the while violating every one of them in the course of your daily activities.

Be able to put out fires on a daily basis, even those only perceived as real by upper management. Be adept at quickly and urgently solving problems by focusing only on the problem’s symptoms, or on one side of the story.

Be able to collect and manage using meaningless metrics; identifying and evaluating imaginary trends striving to increase efficiency at the expense of effectiveness.

Be adept at mixing all the latest management buzz-words (see my book for a run-down of these) into every conversation.

Be able to ignore past lessons learned. Be dedicated to “doing the same thing over, and over, while expecting different results.” Be proficient at selective perception and selective amnesia.

And last, the line that we’ve all seen in a job description…“Be able to perform any other task required by the Department Head.” This is where 90 percent of the work typically comes from and what it really means is that the candidate will spend most of his/her time partaking in useless meetings and management-driven witch hunts. Add to that the fact that, once hired, the candidate will need to spend most of his/her time playing personal and organizational games to better their career, like stump-the-dummy and divide and conquer and throwing colleagues under the bus. The above job description gives you have a glimpse into a normal day in management in the modern workplace.