Shit Sandwich

I once had a particularly bad manager, but their style of ineptitude was fairly common (if not always so severe). She would give me a task to do, but if I asked for any specifics at all about the desired outcome, she’d hem and haw. To illustrate how infuriating this was, imagine your boss asking you to make a sandwich. When you ask what kind, they don’t answer; instead, they question whether or not you know how to make a sandwich. When you insist that you do, but you need more specifics in order to make sure they get what they want, they tell you to just start and check with them at each step.

So you say, “Okay, I’m going to start with a slice of bread, how’s that?” And they tell you they’ll get back to you. A few days later, they do, and tell you that it’s fine.

At this point, I realized the truth about this particular manager. She wasn’t necessarily dumb; she was a coward.

Her boss had told her to tell me to “make a sandwich,” and she didn’t question it. She didn’t ask for specifics. So she didn’t have any to give me. When it took her several days to confirm that “a slice of bread” was fine, it was because she was going back and asking her boss. And her boss was probably going even further up the chain!

It was a madhouse. If you’re a people leader, it’s even more important that you call out your own bad leadership, because if you just pass it along, it compounds exponentially. One person not being able to clarify an objective is bad, but a whole chain of command that can’t give an instruction specific enough to generate a sandwich is a recipe for disaster.