Learning from the Different Levels

I have had the opportunity to spend some time with the workers from the Public Works Department. These guys do things like new road construction, pavement maintenance, inspections, permits, transit and storm water. I have had a great time getting out of the cubicle and onto the street. I put on a reflective vest and a hard hat and shadowed some cool guys. It is always interesting learning the experiences of workers from different levels of the organization. I learn about the organization from the top end perspective where large decisions are made.
I made sure not to try to explain the rationale of why those decisions are made to the street level guys. I honestly don’t fully understand all of the reasons those decisions were made. There are also some politics floating around the decisions that I don’t grasp as well. Rather I just tried to explain how things are taught at ASU. So this allowed me to share a perspective from a manager’s point of view from an academic stand point. Sometimes decisions with unpleasant outcomes are blamed on the manager, both by staff and council. That’s fine because only the Council can get rid of the Manager with a majority vote. Council may not blame the manager openly, but difficult solutions are left to him to propose to make him the bad guy for bringing them up.
Sometimes workers within an organization don’t fully understand the big picture, most times they do. I enjoyed listening to the Public Works guys because they are the no nonsense type and have a good sense of humor. A couple of them have told me to come have lunch with them before I leave. I was pleased to hear that and I will most certainly take them up on that.