“We call him, Teflon,” Audrey said. “Nothing sticks. Things go wrong in his department all the time, but he always has an explanation why one thing or another caused the problem. Always something out of his control. Not his fault.”

“Has he ever taken responsibility for some performance measure in his area?” I asked.

“No, he has never had to. You would think there is a worldwide conspiracy out to get him and foil all his plans. Even when I don’t buy his excuse, he has a backup excuse to replace it. Do you think he is just unlucky?”

“Audrey, sometimes the explanation for the problem tells you more about the explainer than it does about the problem.” -TF

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“But, we got the parts in and shipped the units. I thought we handled that quite well,” protested Valerie.

“You are right, your supervisor did a good job. That’s what supervisors do. But your work, as a manager, was not done,” I replied. “The job of the manager is to create the system. When you discovered you would be short of parts, it was your supervisors job to go find the parts, but it was your job to ask

• Why didn’t our system anticipate this shortage?
• Why didn’t our system detect this shortage as soon as the order was placed into our system?
• Why didn’t our system spot our supplier’s inventory and indicate a shortfall in those parts?
• Why didn’t our system have alternate vendors for those critical parts?
• Why didn’t our system continually track alternate supplier inventories to find odd lots at aggressive pricing?

“The job of the manager is to create the systems, monitor the systems, improve the systems. It’s great that we have a supervisor who knows how to scramble. But I prefer a system that responds to our constantly changing circumstances. The role of the manager is to create those systems.” -TF

“Then what is my role, as the manager?” Valerie asked. “I do all the same stuff as the supervisor, it’s just that most of the time, I handle the bigger problems.”

“Bigger problems, like what?” I followed.

“Like last week, we had a large order for a customer, an international customer, and one of the components from a supplier was defective, 500 units we had to reject. The customer is screaming because he has already sold the first three shipments that we can’t deliver.”

“What did you do, as the manager?”

“Well, I scrambled around and found 500 units from a supplier in California. In fact, they were leftover stock and we got them cheaper than our normal supplier.”

“Why didn’t your supervisor locate them for you?” I asked.

Valerie looked sideways. “Well, actually he did. I said I scrambled, meaning my supervisor scrambled. He is the one who found the parts. It was kind of a lucky break that solved the problem.”

“So your supervisor did his job, as a supervisor, and you failed to do your job as a manager.”

Valerie looked puzzled. -TF