Management skills? We don’t need no steenking management skills.

I had long thought that one of my former employers was the most dysfunctional organization around. Certainly that employer provided lots of fodder when I was in business school – any time there was a “good” or “best practice” discussed, it took no effort whatsoever to think of how that company did the opposite. (And after the class on outsourcing, I had the Operations professor laughing uncontrollably with tales of what that company did.)

It turns out, though, that the BigLawFirm for whom I’m working as a contract attorney is even worse. No employee management skills at all, and precious few project management skills. They share information according to the “Growing Mushrooms” principle (keep ‘em in the dark and feed ‘em manure); they don’t have complete written instructions (why try to have 60 people following a consistent procedure?); they don’t like to train people (they’ll seat a new person next to someone who’s been around for a while, and tell the new person that it’s okay to ask questions); they announce changes to the established procedure by telling about a third of the people and suggesting that they might want to pass it on to the others. They don’t keep track of documents terribly well (the thousands of file boxes are labelled on the outside but fairly randomly placed onto shelves, and there’s no master list keeping track of the location of a particular box of documents or of what processing its documents have undergone), and they manage by deadlines (e.g., the mid-day Thursday announcement of “All of this has to be done by Friday” without regard to whether we have enough resources to get it done by Friday, and sharing for the first time that there’s a Friday deadline despite their having known about the deadline for two months).

The latest trick was to have a partner and associate explain – and with surprising clarity, for once – some new set of procedures to respond to a specific document request, procedures which differed from the “standard” process in a major way. They explained it sufficiently well that all 10 or 12 of the people who heard the explanation and followed it understood it the exact same way. About a week later, the associate returned to inform us that we all had misunderstood the instructions, that it clearly was our fault that we misunderstood, because it had been explained so clearly, and that she’d explain it all to us again, using smaller words in the hope that we might catch on this time. She then set forth an entirely new procedure, markedly different from the original instructions. She then left, leaving us to figure out how to reconcile the two sets of instructions. She came back the next day, to explain it all to us yet again, with exaggerated patience and the thinly veiled belief that we were, collectively, dumber than a box of hammers. And this explanation didn’t match either of the two earlier explanations.

Sigh. I so look forward to working for a real organization.