One of my favorite (sic) things at a job is when a senior person, C-Suite type person claims that “Darrell over here is the subject matter expert on that topic,” and then you ping Darrell and he’s like “The fuck? I don’t do anything with that. That’s Denise.” So then you ping Denise and she’s like “ROFL. I handle accounts receivable, baby. You are looking for Joan.” So you chase down Joan, and she’s like “I did that in 2007. Now it’s Gary.” You find Gary, and turns out he left in October 2018. It’s now 96 hours after the original deliverable and you’re back to writing an email at 7:54pm to the CFO. “So, turns out Darrell WASN’T the subject matter expert, and …”
It’s amazing how these guys spend 80 hours/week consumed by work and can’t fucking figure out who does what in their silos.
Why does this tend to happen?
The big dogs at an office care mostly about tracked financial metrics and very little else. When this attitude scales throughout the organization, it’s called “The Spreadsheet Mentality.”
See, it isn’t so much that Darrell or Joan or whoever owns a specific thing — that matters to Darrell or Joan as a source of professional relevance and aptitude, but it doesn’t necessarily matter to Executive Eddie or ROI Ronnie. What matters to them is simply that it gets done; who does it doesn’t really matter. It’s not the issue.
Many execs manage from a “Warm Body” philosophy, i.e. “As long as the shit is getting done and the trains are running, I don’t really care what specific name of what specific person is doing it.” That’s also why many execs stare at the floor in the elevator. They don’t know these peons; these unwashed masses. Is Gary running point on that? Who gives a shit? What matters is that whatever “that” is gets done.
Honestly, I’ve worked at places where execs barely knew the names and wife/children names of their direct reports, and we expect them to know who “subject matter experts” are aside from experts on the revenue-facing parts of the business? ROFL.
Can we fix it?
Not really — if an org is hitting their financial numbers, chances are they won’t care much about who owns what in terms of middling day-to-day tasks and supposed subject matter expertise.
We could promote less assholes and more self-aware people into leadership, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on that happening, since we tend to promote solely off performance, and usually off revenue-facing performance at that.
It tends to backfire, but we don’t know a better way really.
In the meantime, budget about 100 hours the next time you gotta chase down information on some specific, yet wholly unimportant thing at work. No one will really know who “owns” it.
