How to play Snakes and Ladders?

[prabha_friend]

But in Office...

HR Department wants me to give technical trainings to the Operations People. Even my Boss is ready to grant permission for that, but not her bosses and the aboves. due to some silly "non-technical" stuffs like office politics. How to come above?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I worked in a U.S. Navy personnel management office with layers upon layers upon layers, formality on top of formality. We had our share of snakes, I can assure you, and it often felt like we were climbing a very long, very steep ladder.

The keyword is e-mail. We had a saying: If you didn't get approval in e-mail, it wasn't approved. The way to "cover your butt" was that you did NOTHING without written approval including a statement of scope of action. Didn't matter how many witnesses were at the meeting. No e-mail? No approval! No approval? No project!

There ARE exceptions, however. The key is to know your job description. What does your job description say in writing? Anything asked of you outside of that description needs proper approval and some kind of scope-of-work statement. Anything within the job description is fair game for the bosses to ask.

Notice also that NONE of what I said applies in a loose, informal office environment. But when the higher-up managers and directors want to have a say in what is done, you are at the wrong end of the telescope to see "their big picture." So you ALWAYS maintain a low profile.

 

[Cronk]

You gotta love the pubic service. And big corporate is very similar. During my stint in the federal public service before going contract work as a systems developer, involved me one time as a note taker in a meeting with international officials. When I submitted my draft notes to my boss, he made some changes including one where it said "Mr boss said we would support....." with the change being to "Mr Boss said we would NOT support ...". When I asked about that, he said that is what he should have said. It's the written record that matters not the reality.

Same way the victor gets to write the official record of the war.

 

[Pat Hartman]

I worked for several large government contractors (before email) and they all had variations on DGVO - Don't give verbal orders. These were notepads with brightly colored paper and two carbons plus the original. Made sense when you were talking about change orders - which were their own form separate from DGVO, also in triplicate, but generally carried to extremes as Doc pointed out.