You don’t have to have a micromanaging boss or one that’s truly crazy to experience the friction between having a boss and getting good work done. How do you keep your boss (or manager or client) from messing with your work?
Photo by Ol.v!er [H2vPk]
Author Rachel Kroll discusses on her blog the tendency of some people to always have to influence or change a project:
Have you ever noticed how some people want to “touch” everything which is being done on a project, even if it has nothing to do with them? It need not be huge, but it seems like they want to have just a small deviation applied to all potential changes. It’s almost like they want to be able to point at any given part and say “I’m the reason that happened”.
Kroll recounts a story where a developer added a sacrificial, unnecessary duck character to an animated chess game, knowing the manager would say “just remove the duck” and leave the important stuff alone.
Sneaky? Yes. But sometimes when working with difficult people you have to resort to trickery to keep the people in charge from damaging your perfect snowflake.
Got any similar experiences to share?
Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory [rachelbythebay]
Comments
2 responses to “How Do You Keep Your Boss From Interfering With Or Ruining Your Work?”
By being 3000 KM away from him 🙂
A friend in the public service used to write submissions to cabinet. His superior always made changes. The submission then went to the next higher up, who used to change everything back to the original.