Karen manager demands IT technician take business server offline during business hours, despite technician's protests, gets the order in writing before complying: ‘Within 15 minutes, the office was in chaos. The CFO stormed into my office’

Undoubtedly, the hardest part of being a manager is letting go. Throughout your entire career, you've been doing everything yourself. If there's something that needs to be done, take a look at it, create a plan of action, and then work through it yourself until you've seen it through. 

But if you're successful enough at seeing your own work through, you'll eventually get promoted and have that work taken off you. You'll instead be tasked with managing the people doing that work. Now, there's all this productivity being done that you have no time to do yourself, limited now to only oversight by pure necessity. 

But letting go is necessary and important. And especially when you're managing a business or work group that falls outside your technical expertise, you need to be able to relinquish direct control and accept their advice. Sure, you need to use common sense in signing off on any decision, but you need to accept that you might lack the knowledge and experience that is essential to common sense.

Either way, at a certain point, you just need to trust the people beneath you.

This boss proved herself incapable of doing so when she demanded that the IT department urgently perform scheduled maintenance and doubled down on the order despite their protests. When she insisted that the IT technician had the foresight to get her to send the request in an email to get it in writing.

The technician had already scheduled the maintenance for an upcoming Sunday, when there was unlikely to be any sort of disruption. But the boss had issued an order and was keen to see it executed, seemingly thinking about nothing but compliance with her decision.

Chaos predictably ensued as the servers went down at 10:30 AM, right during peak business hours, sparking a response from upper management that would see the boss embarrassed and the process amended to ensure she couldn't stick her nose where it didn't belong again. 

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Author image for Brad Dickson Brad Dickson
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