Got the concept from this article, which is mostly kinda interesting although is essentially just describing how CEOs want shit done and don’t care about the impact on people in the process. See also: burnout.
You see this a lot in management with some dipshit named Barry micromanaging you to death on a project, including 12:03am emails. At the end of the day, Barry will tell you (and others) that he’s “being helpful.” But is Barry allowed to decide what “helpful” is? Doesn’t the recipient of the effort get to decide whether it’s helpful? Isn’t this kind of the same discussion where elitist peeps give 1 hour of time to a cause and say “I was helpful,” even though those impacted by the cause are like “Who’s that?”
The person who needs the help gets to decide whether it really was help, no? And in most cases with management, that’s going to be the employee.
Managers love to hide behind “Well, I was helpful” or “I know best,” even though they often use their time incredibly poorly and cripple the economy and can’t set their own priorities. A lot of times, especially for me, when a manager gets involved the whole situation becomes more complicated and tedious, but the end goal is further in sight. I had a gig once in 2018 where they hired a woman named Carmen to be over “social efforts,” and all she did was create 54 tracking documents and all these forms/questions we had to fill out about what competitors were posting, and it basically stopped us from actually posting. So, it was broadly kind of absolutely pointless and regressed the output, but to anyone in earshot, Carmen was “helping!”
Managers often think they’re helping when, in reality, the main way they could “help” would be to understand what their team needs, work with hiring on how to find those types of people, hire competent people, explain the political ecosystem of the organization to them, explain the initial priorities and workflows, and get the ever-loving fuck out of the way.
That’s all. That’s it. That would probably be “helpful” in the eyes of the employee, who really gets to determine what “help” is here.
