This so-called management technique is part of cadre of useless knee-jerk, emotional responses used by managers with broken tool boxes, and probably broken spirits.
I once attended a seminar or conference, I don’t remember which, and one of the main speakers began by saying she had a “Whack-A-Mole Management” style. She continued by describing the correlations between the way she addressed situations at work and the arcade game.
Initially, we in the audience thought her remarks were aimed at providing a clever relief from the otherwise boring monologues of the speakers who preceded her. But the longer she went on about this subject we got a different sense of the situation altogether.
Whack-A-Mole is definitely a reactive game, there is no strategy you can use to predetermine where the next mole head will pop up. What we were actually hearing was her frustration with things at work seemingly beyond her control. Rather than working to revise the rules of the game (or the game for that matter), she had given in to the status quo by trying to sharpen her whacking reaction time.
Her message to the audience for successful management was to improve your reaction time to the events that are out of your control, because most situations were indeed out of your control. The realization the audience was rapidly reaching as a group was that you can be the invited speaker at a seminar and still be a full bubble off level and all your pups aren’t necessarily barking (whatever that means). Or put another way, bad advice is just that, no matter who it comes from.
Some people naturally gravitate to the role of being the victim of their situation, rather than taking responsibility for their life and career. They even sometimes try to put a good face on it by honing or embellishing their coping skills, as this person did. Rather than taking control of her work situation by restructuring how the game was to be played or the game itself she chose to change her management style to cope with a bad situation.
Sometimes bad situations at work are just bad situations and no amount of assertiveness or finesse can make them improve or go away. But, you can still take charge of your career, by choosing to work elsewhere. I guess this is where I come in to offer you options. At the risk of sounding like your mother, you do deserve better, you know. Call me bias, but I believe Riverside County as a responsible employer focused on enhancement of its human capital and a culture which promotes governmental excellence could be just the place for you to grow and thrive.
Speaking of excellence, let me say that no matter what you feel your relationship with your boss is now, a bad mentor is no mentor at all. One of Riverside County – Human Resources Department’s program divisions is the
Center for Government Excellence. In addition to specific working skills, the Center has Technical Development, Professional Assistants, Supervisory Excellence, and Management Excellence training academies, plus the Leadership Initiative which helps to develop the County’s future leaders.
Yours truly is enrolled in an academy starting at the beginning of July, and finishing at the end of October. County training is not a quickie one day session where you get a Xeroxed copy of a certificate with a blank left to write your name in. To the contrary, this is serious material featuring state of the art theory and training for practical application in today’s work setting. (Gee… I am starting to sound like a commercial… well yes, I guess I am… but you would too if you worked for the County here in the Desert.)