Evasion And Abdication
One way to evade or abdicate responsibility is to never write anything down. Writing something down is a form of commitment because other people can see what you wrote, and archive it, and use it to hold you accountable.
“The palest of ink is better than the best memory.” – Chinese proverb
As a rule, managers don’t write down what they’ve signed up to do because they don’t “do” anything of substance. Of course, everyone in a standard cookie-cutter corpo hierarchy unquestioningly accepts that it’s “not a manager’s job” to do or commit to anything. Managers do, however, insist that others write things down because without the written word a manager can’t periodically poll for status and hold others accountable when schedules are missed.
On the other hand, really bad managers love to conjure up and write down what work others are required to do and when that work is due (even when they don’t have a klue what the work is). It’s the best of both worlds because they can hold others accountable without having to be held accountable themselves (whoopee!).
Even if managers are held accountable for poor team performance by higher up meta-managers (who also don’t write down their non-existent commitments), they don’t experience a guilty conscience because they fall back on the “the team failed and not me because it’s not my job” mentality.
When was the last time your immediate manager asked you “what problems are you having and how can I help?” or told you “let me know when you run into a problem so that I can try my best to help you“?
Disclaimer: I don’t have any badges or credentials and I just make things up, so don’t believe a word I say.
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Writing stuff down means that you might be responsible for it. I have been in meeting were many topics were covered and at some depth. With only a few people taking notes. Either the non-note takers have a much memory than I or once leaving the room the discussion is behind them.
Bad managers are too lazy to write anything down other then a bad review of somebody to cover their own tracks.
Also I find it interesting with the availability of tracking tasks via Outlook even your phone that the todo list of people is blank. They use the meeting schedule as a todo list.