Judith, a young manager, sounded very aggrieved when she spoke. “Here am I, wanting to prove my abilities as a manager, and nobody has told me what I should be doing”.

I took a thoughtful sip of my Theakston’s Old Peculier. We sat in a dingy pub around the corner of the vast Imperial Bank where we worked. We were having a heart-to-heart about her struggles.

She had made the oldest mistake in management; assuming that someone, somewhere, knew beforehand, what a manager should be doing. For the ordinary mortal in IT, it was simple. Developers developed, Systems Administrators administered systems, Compliance officers rushed around …er… complying, and so on. Unless managers walk into an existing role that is being done successfully, they aren’t generally that lucky. They are given a desk, and told who is reporting to them and then very much left to get on with it. It is rare for anyone else to actually know what their mission and purpose actually is, and if they did, they’d be unlikely to tell the appointee for fear of getting it slightly wrong.

Often, when a manager is appointed in a Multinational, it is done by a strange osmosis. There is a vague consciousness that a different mix in the management team will ‘effect change’ or ‘instil a new dynamism’. Just as a bee-keeper will put a new queen in a hive without telling her how to make honey, a senior management team will parachute in a manager with little more than a half-baked wish for greater efficiency.

“The primary task of a newly appointed manager is to work out what on earth is expected of them. There will always be the odd clue here and there, and you may be told what your role isn’t, but never what it is.”.

“That’s not fair”, she glowered.

Ah. Another problem, The absurd idea that life in IT should be fair to everyone: It isn’t, and the very thought that it could be made so gave me an involuntary shudder. Some managers were given an easy life, and others given tasks that were almost impossible. It is a predicament we all share in the industry. We’re all gamblers in our working lives, and sometimes we draw a very poor hand. We just shrug and look forward to the next game. It is bad form to blame the cards.

“I do exactly what I think is expected of me, but it just doesn’t seem to be right.”.

Ooh. Big mistake: Sometimes, you’re given deliberately misleading information about what your job is. Occasionally, the real reason for an appointment is devious. I’ve seen a complete ass who had little excess mental energy over and above that which was required to control his bodily functions, propelled into an important job as Head of Division in the sure hope that he’d make such a mess of it that they could then justifiably shut the entire division down. There are other, diabolical, tricks done in business.

“Have you never heard of the ‘Tethered Goat’ trick?”

“No. Should I? It wasn’t mentioned in business school.”

“Tut tut! It is just one of those things one learns in business. I sometimes think that, one day when I’ve left the Imperial Bank, I shall write a compelling book on business techniques based solely on Brer Rabbit and Aesop’s fables. The ‘Tethered Goat’ technique will be in there along with the ‘Briar Patch’ “.

Sometimes the real reason for an appointment comes as a surprise. I’ve written of my shock of discovering that the purpose of my appointment to one company was merely to be a whipping boy: there to take the blame for almost every ill in the organisation. It proved to be a reasonable way of earning a living, in retrospect. I still remember the shock of discovering that I’d been appointed to a different company that turned out to have links to organised crime, merely to add tone, dignity and respectability to the organisation.

“Well, what do you suggest that I do?” she asked, brusquely. I’d been lost in reverie. The barman, a grim-faced cove with an attitude problem, glanced up from polishing the bar.

“Simple, really; nobody is ever appointed to a job unless there is a group is under pressure, reacting to events. Somewhere in the organisation is a manager, or a team of managers, who is reacting to bad things by appointing you. You just need to find out why you were appointed and relieve the pressure that sparked it all off by sorting out the bad things, or as we say nowadays, ‘addressing the issues’.

She looked sulky. She brooded on the unfairness of it all. The fates had, so far, been spectacularly kind to her, and she’d been protected from uncertainty and the capriciousness of fate for too long. The shock of the sudden unfairness of it all was too much.

“Surely it is better to wait for a clear directive. They ought to tell me.”

“I suspect that they would if they knew”. We drifted back to the office. I didn’t tell her about the ‘Turkey’ principle. One can imagine these simple souls tucking into the mash with pleasure as the days shorten and puzzling over the exact nature of their roles in the greater organisation of the farm. ‘Why is the farmer so nice to us? Is it because we are such beautiful and intelligent creatures? Is it for our business insights? Why is promotion here so swift? Why are there so few older, more senior turkeys?’” No, Judith wasn’t ready for the explanation of the ‘Turkey principle’.