Managing Up

14The Impulsive Boss

“Squirrel!”

—Dug the talking dog

 

Real‐Life Story

Erik was the IT enterprise architect for a large law enforcement agency and reported directly to Hal, the chief information officer. “Hal was a diehard agency man. He loved the agency and loved the people. He was off the charts passionate. If you wanted any kind of internal sales pitch or rah‐rah session, you'd call Hal. He was a whirlwind of ideas – and emotions. He was so passionate about the mission that it kind of blinded him to reality and made working for him really hard. He was constantly coming up with new ideas and initiatives – a total big‐ideas guy. And this was not a big‐ideas kind of organization, so we spent a lot of time chasing rainbows. He was famous for e‐mailing us at 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. with his latest new ideas, just firing off these e‐mails, like ‘Tomorrow when you get in, we have to talk about…’ Every time he had a new idea – he went all in. Of course, 99 percent of the time, he came up with these grandiose ideas that just seemed unattainable to everybody. People would just roll their eyes and be like ‘there he goes again.’ His management style was to run from office to office, talking to people. ‘Okay, a new issue has come out, we need to run to this office and talk to this other person. Okay, now we need to run to this office and tell them what we talked about in the other office’ – and, of course, each meeting shifted the priorities. He was just simply all over the place. It ...