In Defense of Management
(Part 3)
Let us now observe the metamorphosis of a Blue Collar employee to a White Collar puppetmaster. To step away from one's toiling fellows and enter the world of managerial largess, the ties of camaraderie are twisted and strained in ways that inexorably sever them. Despite enthusiastic pledges of fidelity, a polar shift has taken place, and the open doors of warm reception with past fellows are slowly shut. The forcing of opinions in matters of procedure breeds resentment among old friends. Former fellows foster feelings of diminished status. Inadequate servility towards the newly promoted forces an eventual reproach, a laying down of authority. Once this breech has been crossed, all but the rarest of workplace friendships will fall by the wayside. When former fellows gather, barbed jokes about you are bandied about. Grab-ass horseplay and former tolerances of your proclivities are eroded until what was once endearing is now offensive, if not repugnant. In the blink of an eye, what was once jolly good humor has become taboo.
There is no going back. To abandon the course undertaken and attempt to undo the transformation as a middle-manager would only disenfranchise one as a failure in the eyes of both groups. There is no cure other than competency during this chrysalis period of one's transformation from grub to moth. Former Blue Collar workers hold the touchstone of one's managerial mettle to a much harder surface than any other breed of manager, and rightly so. To know what is involved in any undertaking, and having tasted the bitter draught of nonsensical taskings, the nouveau taskmaster has no excuse to shield himself from the harsh criticisms of former mates.
In some cases, one is expected to maintain some semblance of fellowship by lending a hand in the drudgeries one has just proscribed. The separation here is acutely felt, as your fellows know that when you are not beside them, you are lounging inside while they toil in unabashed cold. But by keeping abreast of upcoming changes and problematic situations from a centrally-located desk, the insightful manager is able to affect a solution before problems arise, thus saving the cursing fellows a great deal of effort outdoors. This notion is lost in their wrathful jealousy. A pro-active stance from management is an attribute lost on the suffering laborer. Reactive management is far more endemic to the various Antarctic departments, and is thus more familiar to the near-sighted ethos of the laboring peons.
But a manager who constantly acts as one of the minions interferes with the group dynamics (as nobody likes to work with the boss) and acts to usurp the foreman of the crew, effectively creating a now superfluous team leader, who naturally resents the diminished authority. Such continual hands-on participation from a manager is an affront to God's order and it blurs the lines of nature. It is like having sex with animals or making deserts out of vegetables (i.e.: Zucchini Bread: what kind of an abomination is this? A sacrilege conjured up by one of these gender-blurring Neo-Hippies that infest the kitchens of the Antarctic stations.) The new manager's hammer-forged inclination for action and physical activity is an initial hurdle on the path to officialdom that only time will overcome. The desk-bound comfort of the new position is an insidious treat, since in one's former incarnation respites from manual labor were stolen moments of ease, and just as sweet as a pilfered cookie in one's youth. Now the cookie jar of surfeit ease is under your command and while initially this feels like wealth, the constant diet of languid exertions diminishes the flavor, but increases the appetite for comfortable vacillation, and the inexorable decline begins.
Therein lies the conundrum of my own experience as a manager. Only through manual labor have I been able to give any semblance of strength and steel to the indolence and languor that is my true nature. In my role as a puppetmaster, lounging in this blasé bureaucratic atmosphere virtually devoid of repercussions, any lack of diligence on my part shall only encourage if not excite my own profound negligence of everything.
The middle manager is as old as Man, and the species as it exists in Antarctica has evolved outside the constraints of accountability and exists in a state of eroding isolation. The brain-fevered ideology of the remote outpost manager as a beacon of enlightened civilization died in the Congo a hundred years ago. The larger legacy of middle management lies in its dictums on the nature of bureaucratic responsibility. This school places every impetus on abject security and recoils from the risks involved in direct decision-making or in the sponsoring of insightful changes. Longevity is its mantra, first and last and always.
These bureaucratic toadies are in fact the very axis of our civilization. Without them we are condemned as a species to disintegration and unsustainable drive. Managerial mediocrity is the very mortar of our civilization, and no institution in Heaven or on Earth would fail to crumble in the absence of its mollifying umbrage.