On Fri, 25 Apr 2008 22:12:35 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> The Director of IT may
> or may not be any good at IT, but he is *guaranteed* to be better at
> politics than you. He had to get there somehow...

In my experience, that's actually generally not the case.  Many times, 
it's not that they're better at politics, but rather that they ended up 
with responsibilities they hadn't planned on when they were first hired.

Hell, that's how I ended up in my current role.  If you'd asked me 5 
years ago if I'd be a program manager, I'd have told you there was no way 
I'd leave the technical field.

Yet here I am, slowly losing some of my technical acumen because I don't 
use it every day the way I used to.  Doesn't mean I'm IT-stupid by any 
stretch - and in fact it's helped me in working with my IT organisation, 
because I can say "I've BTDTGTTS, so I understand where you're coming 
from".

But several of the bosses I've worked for over the years - in IT and out 
of it - got promoted not because of their political skills, but because 
they had some quality that the person doing the promotion was looking for 
- a vision, an idea, even in a couple of cases they were friends/long-
time colleagues with the person doing the promotion.

> In fairness, they're not geniunely *trying* to make my job harder.
> They're just not terribly organised, and they don't really think through
> the consequences of their actions. And they're hopeless at
> communicating...

Whereas you aren't.  I'm serious about that, when you put your mind to 
it, you do a good job communicating - so use those skills in talking with 
them.  It sounds like you're on the right track with following them 
around and writing stuff down - don't be afraid to say to them "hey, slow 
down - I know you've got a lot of work to do, but I need to record this 
for the audit and I'm falling behind here."

Jim

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