"I didn't know what you've been doing, so I gave you average."

The above is an exact quote from a manager I had very early on in my career. The reference was obviously to my yearly review. That would not have been a bad thing if I had been taking the typical managerial stance by spending the whole year waiting for someone else to do something. But it wasn't. I had spent the year redesigning the backplane for a system that had been originally designed way before my time. During this period my days consisted of getting in and the next thing I would know, everyone would be going home. In those days, PCB design was done on paper, there were no personal computers.

Now the manager in question used to be one of my co-workers. He was one of those types, yeah, you've seen them, that like to dress up really nice. He would even leave his keys on his desk because he didn't want them to make a hole in his pants pocket. He had started out as an engineer on this project, transferred to marketing (you saw that coming, didn't you?) then returned as our boss. Somehow he had convinced someone that he would be the savior of the project.

At the point when my review was due, he had been with the project roughly 3 to 4 months. Do you know what an engineer can do in a period of 3 to 4 months? Then witness how much this manager had done in the same period. He had not even figured out what his workers had been doing! Although we should qualify that, because he was a manager, he probably didn't want to or didn't care what I was doing. It was much easier to give me 'average' than to actually find out what I was doing.

His stupid management trick worked very well. Within a month I was gone to another job. Incidentally, I got a 20% raise to change jobs.

You would actually think that eventually even the dimmest manager would figure out that their tricks backfire 99% of the time. But managers have a built in defense mechanism that saves their pride when they cause something bad to happen. We'll explore that next time when I tell the story of the Voluntary Separation Plan.