The Tragedy of the Welder

When I started my corporate career, I was a programmer. I figured I’d sit in a dark room, and every once in a while somebody would slip a pizza under my door. I’d be left alone to do my work. Things didn’t turn out that way. I ran into what Mark Hortsman calls “The Tragedy of the Welder”.

It goes something like this:

There once was a welder who was very good at his job. He enjoyed welding, his work quality was high, he worked fast. He delivered results, and his bosses were happy.

Because Joe was good at welding, his bosses wanted to reward him. They promoted him, gave him more money and more responsibility. This included some other junior welders to work under him.  Instead of doing what he enjoyed (welding), he found himself spending more and more of his time doing paperwork, sorting out problems with his staff, dealing with missed deadlines, anything but actually welding. Joe soon found that he wasn’t enjoying coming to work as much as he used to.  Some days he didn’t even want to go to work. He thought maybe he should quit and find another job. Go back to just welding.

He wasn’t happy, his bosses weren’t happy, and the other welders started wondering when Joe became such a jerk. He wasn’t one of the guys anymore, nor good at his job. Now he was just another know-nothing manager. The best welder wasn’t welding anymore, and he wasn’t really enjoying being the boss. Morale dropped. Production and quality fell.

It wasn’t Joe’s fault. He didn’t let the promotion go to his head. He was still trying to good job, because he enjoyed being good at what he did. That’s part of what made him a good welder to begin with, and people respected him for it. What he didn’t have were the skills to be a good manager of welders.

Being a manager & leader is different from being a good welder, or any other skill. It is also a skill in itself, which means it can be learned, practised, and measured.

There is a lot of management & leadership theory out there. Much of it is useless. Most of it fails the “so what?” test. The theory sounds great, or makes us feel good for a while, but so what? How am I supposed to use theory to get things done? What’s the benefit? What’s the deliverable? What does this theory look like in practise?

Theory doesn’t tell us what we really want to know – what to do, who does it, and how you know when you’re done.

I’ve run into a lot of leadership in theory and in practise. I learned the most from my mistakes and others’ examples. I learned to apply the “so what” rule to figure out what works and what doesn’t, and to get work done through other people. While individuals sometimes create great works, nobody works alone (not even Michaelangelo). People working together execute all significant, worthwhile human endeavours. Which means somebody, or several some bodies, lead and coordinate that effort.

Next time: applying the “so what?” test to management theory.