Managing to Fail

Who You Gonna Call?

Your manager can help you resolve problems and be your team's snowplow. With the right information provided at the right time. So of course you'll need to avoid this combination. Indeed leveraging your manager is another opportunity to spread the misery to other teams and really clog up the gears in the general clockwork.

To begin with there's the classic "Have your manager call their manager" scenario. This involves ignoring regular channels of communications and ticketing systems and such like, and just demanding people on other teams do things for you. If you've left your infrastructure requirements or other necessities for an important deliverable to the last minute you can trigger all out manager warfare.

Teams will be left scrambling and deployment dates will be missed - fingers will be pointed, management will be irate, and business will be red-faced-and-demanding-answers-as-to-why-we're-late-again.

If you're doing your best to fail hard you can high-five yourself at this point. You've probably seriously dented confidence in your abilities as a professional, or are having to update the old Curriculum Vitae.

But of course there are always ways to fail upwards simply by providing your manager with incorrect information. A vapid goal with misleading information is easily achieved. So talk the talk and open up the glitter. Remember - completing all the necessary work to deliver unbelievable results is difficult. Otherwise everyone would be doing it. It's much easier to break out the smoke and mirrors. Talk big, deliver little, and get your manager and other management bought into the project.

With enough management necks on the line any deliverable might just be good enough. After all, champagne is easier to swallow than failure.