Snow job

Everyone who lives in Seattle knows that we can’t handle snow here. The weather people predict an inch of the cold stuff and bam, we’re all charging off to the grocery store to stockpile canned goods with thoughts of the Donner party dancing in our heads.

But occasionally, the snow really does come down. Last December, Seattle was paralyzed by a series of snowstorms that left 16 inches in my neighbor’s yard and proved impossible for the city’s transportation department to keep up with. I live at the bottom of a steep hill: if it weren’t for my neighbors and their enormous pickup truck, I’d have been living off canned white beans and instant pudding for a week. I was grateful for the community I live in, and chalked up the complete lack of plowing as one of those things.

It turns out that it was one of those management things. The entire process was badly handled, and then people in charge spent more energy spinning the results from “failure” to “adequate” than they had, perhaps, spent on the process itself.

And it gets better. It’s come to light recently that the manager in charge of street maintenance (with primary and direct responsibility for snow emergency response and removal) was promoted to that position after a $515,000 study verified that as a manager he was “viewed as unsafe, dictatorial, vindictive, unwilling to listen even … by credible, well-respected witnesses.”

That’s right. The City of Seattle spent $515,000 of taxpayer money to produce an 8,000 page report that detailed management incompetence specifically in the core skills of managing humans well. After reading this report, the manager’s boss promoted him into the street maintenance job because she wanted a tough manager in the job.

I’m shaking my head. When the going gets tough, the truly tough do not create chaos — they keep people pulled together and achieving results even through their business equivalent of 16 inches of snow. It drives me nuts that the city administration spent half a million dollars just to find out that one guy lacks skills — and then they promoted him. And he was unable to articulate a plan, set priorities, or motivate his team to be effective while the snow piled up and people’s health and well-being were imperiled. He’s responsible for that, and so is his boss, and so is her boss (that would be the Mayor).

Managing humans poorly does not just mean that you hurt their feelings; it means that you jeopardize their health and safety, and the ultimate survival of your business. It means your company is wasting money and wasting the skills of people who would be doing a good job if only their manager would help rather than hinder them.

The skills of good management matter. They are essential. They are what would have made our snow removal happen. And they would have cost the city of Seattle a lot less than $515,000 to get.