(08-21-2019 01:06 PM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  Interesting take JR.


The interesting part to me was that, "A “higher sense of moral duty” makes it tougher for them to respect deadlines or work in a team." I've noticed this when dealing with the bureaucratic side of many of my jobs - people who are really engaged in their job function tend to be narrow minded and don't care about anything outside their own niche.

The attitude is, "My department's rules are sacred because (fill in the blank) is the most important function in our whole company. Your deadline/budget doesn't matter to me."

The people that don't care as much are more likely accept new ideas or bend ridiculous rules in order to help the whole organization.

Like the zookeepers in the article who opposed a carousel. Who cares if a carousel is crass commercialism? Crass commercialism provides revenue that can be used to provide better care for the animals. That's the big picture thinking that hyper-engaged moral crusaders miss.

We aren't looking at this a different way. We are seeing the response to two different situations. There are many employees who love their set parameters because it really forms the basis of a simplified minimum of expectations from their job. If they like their job because it is easily managed and not too much responsibility is placed upon them then of course they will go along with whatever management suggests as long as it doesn't disturb what is required of them.

For those who are trying to understand their jobs and who feel responsible to customers, other employees, or even to their immediate manager are probably going to be a bit more suspicious of changes to the "system". It doesn't mean they are less adaptable. It merely means they need to understand how the change will affect the whole system before they buy in.

But neither of those are the ones I was referring to. I was referring to those who have the intellect to understand how changes in the data affect the whole system of their area, and who sometimes have begun to understand how that data affects systems beyond their area. Those folks are clued in enough to know almost immediately what will be impacted and when they raise concerns they should be listened to, but instead usually become flagged by managers who know they are beyond their own skill sets, or by upper level management who might be manipulating numbers and resent someone calling attention to them. This is particularly true of companies who quarterly have to meet projections where numbers are only fudged at the upper echelon. In this case it is far beyond the example of adding the carousel which the zookeeper merely thought was extraneous to his work.

Most work today is some form of data transferal or data generation. Most companies compartmentalize those streams so that one area may respond to the data generated in another, but does not understand beyond their own function what that data does. Military code breaking worked similarly with those who collected information not ever able to see enough of it to become a security risk, while those at the top collated and analyzed that data and drew conclusions from it. Most corporations work the same way and those below the upper echelon seldom grasp the real relevance of their portion of the data. They only know to report data that falls within their guidelines and have to accept data prima facia coming from other departments. But where there is data entry there are data entry mistakes. Employees smart enough to recogonize mistakes can save the company embarrassment, unless the mistaken data is intentional and from the top. Most companies find it much easier to have employees that can't interpret data or spot mistakes outside of their area, than to have those who understand the relationship between data subsets and can spot mistakes or raise embarrassing questions.

I've simply witnessed more than a few of these kinds of situations and what eventually happened to the employees to smart for their own good.