Learn to use a flip chart!

I was immediately blessed when entering federal service to share an office with the chief of our office. Dave had been detailed from another agency so was experienced in the ways of bureaucracy. We were a brand new agency and seating was in flux. I was just fortunate, temporarily, to find a desk in his office and thus be able to observe a real pro in action.

I overheard every phone conversation as well as his face-to-face meetings with staffers. I saw the perfect example of how to get things done in a bureaucracy. But I also learned that his competence was his undoing, that stupidity at the top can have tragic consequences.

Dave was such a great leader that staffers who were assigned elsewhere in the new agency came to his meetings and volunteered for assignments simply because the work was so necessary and interesting. And because of his leadership ability.

Part of Dave’s secret was his use of a flip chart whenever more than two persons were planning something. He would listen to the conversation, then post a word or phrase as shorthand for something we wanted to consider. Once we were clear on what needed to happen we would generate a list of tasks which he would post on the left side of the sheet, leaving room at the right for three columns: Specific Result, Who Is Responsible (with an L beside the leader’s name) and the Date the product was due.

Sounds so simple, but I had never seen it down before. We read the legislation creating our office, figured out what we needed to produce, and within two months created all of the documents necessary to fully implement the requirements of the law. (You can do this with any assignment.)

We put all the documents needed for signature by the big boss into a loose leaf binder, along with some notes on implementation.

I was so convinced of Dave’s planning method that I began to carry a flip chart into meetings, even those called by other people. I even had one blowhard tell me to “get that flip chart outta here!” You can imagine what his meetings were like.

Not long after we sent our product up the line for sign-off Dave walked into the office pale as a ghost and sat staring at the floor head in his hands. “What happened?” I asked. Then he told me the story.

Dave’s supervisor said that when he handed the binder to the big boss, he replied: “Do you expect me to read that? I spent more time writing my dissertation than it would take me to read that crap,” and threw the binder back at Dave’s supervisor.

Of course Dave and all of us were thunderstruck. Was this the reward for competence and purposeful effort? But the worst was to come.

A few weeks later, Dave got a call from his old agency. They informed him that the action making Dave a permanent employee in our agency had been denied on the grounds that he was incompetent for the position! His old agency invited him to return—with a promotion.

It took two years to gain approval of the documents as we fed the contents of the binder one by one up the line for signature.

This glimpse of bureaucracy so shook me that I explored how I might return to my old job back in North Carolina. But I was making a good salary, had just moved to Washington DC, and had a wife and three young children. I was stuck.

Lesson: Many bosses fear the competence of their underlings. Try to find out if you are working for a maniac and keep a low profile until s/he moves on…and be sure, they will move on.