Much is made of the effective differences between managers who can delegate tasks to their employees and managers who can not. As an example, I lead a crew of thirty Classroom Support technicians, each required to perform support appointments multiple times per shift. We do over 100 distinct appointments a day sometimes, so it would be completely impossible for just one person to do the job. I am required to delegate, and there are some people that do not understand that working in such an environment is not an excuse to do a foul job. When things go wrong, I get yelled at, and rightly so; it is the responsibility of the supervisor, after all, to ensure that his or her office is run smoothly and according to the needs of the customers.
There are also supervisors who more or less refuse to hand out tasks as they are assigned to their units. If I call something upstairs to the assistant director for user support services, he will do it personally (unless otherwise occupied with dullardry at that specific moment). I have to rotate task assignments - if I don't, nobody does.
I have also seen the end result of not delegating tasks that can and should be handed out to employees. Undue stress, a lack of desire to be at work, a general lack of respect for the perceived work ethic of employees - all of these collaborate to create an unfavorable environment for actually getting anything done without suffering. Note that things do get done, but at a greater cost - paying employees to not do much and bearing an entire office's workload.
[Nerd mode: on]However, I can also think of one supervisor who refused to delegate, and that refusal saved him his life. Darth Vader was aboard the first Death Star during the onset of the Battle of Yavin, at which point it was reported to him that the rebel alliance was sending smaller fighters than the station's defenses could track and counter (save for poor Porkins). His response? He called for a crew to be readied, and personally led the defenses.
Why would he do such a thing? Well, Imperial pilots are likely to be specially trained standard henchmen, but standard henchmen just the same. In fact, we can see this during both the pursuit of the Millennium Falcon through the asteroid belt and the Battle of Endor. So it makes perfect sense that Darth Vader, being the arrogant, angsty Anakin Skywalker we all grew to hate thanks to Hayden Christensen's portrayal of same, would personally oversee the defense of the most important weapon in not only the struggle against the rebel alliance, but also the empire's ruthless control of the entire Galaxy.
Of course, due to Han Solo's change of heart and decision to support the rebellion, Vader missed the opportunity to foil Luke's chance at successfully lobbing the torpedos down the exhaust shaft, and was thrown off into space; however, an important side effect of that twisting rocket ride off into space is that he lived to continue the fight against the rebels. He wasn't aboard the "invulnerable" Death Star, brought down by but a single fighter, just as he had implied earlier in the film.
So, the moral of the story seems to be that there are times where it pays to be selfish and distrustful of your subordinates - it might just save your life.
Bonus discussion question! Do you think the Death Star had attracted an atmosphere by the time of its destruction?
[edit from 2019: as I've been scrolling through and removing broken posts from years past and marveling at the number of spilled pixels about nothing, I think this is it - this is the post that I in 2019 find most embarrassing. I think I must have written this right after I got my DVD copies of the original trilogy Star Wars movies and watched them back-to-back-to-back.]
No comments:
Post a Comment