A quick thought for today about effective managers who inspire employees to perform at the highest levels. In other words, this post is about some mythical person I’ve never met.

The pressing question of the moment: Why would our boss send a bulk email to the company’s outside suppliers and vendors expressing “appreciation” to them for their patience and understanding when dealing with us, the company’s incompetent staff – and then copy the email to every single member of said incompetent staff???

It literally boggles my mind. Dear mind, you have done been boggled.

We’ve been told ad infintum in various direct and indirect methods where we belong on the food chain, so when additional communiques of this nature come down the pike, they really hold little meaning to us. “Um, yeah,” we say. “You’ve always shown us how you feel. Repeatedly. You can keep beating all you want but that horse is already dead.”

Here is what the email said. I’m paraphrasing with poetic license from memory here:

Dear Supplier and/or Vendor,

As you know, I was out of the office recently. I want to express my appreciation to you for dealing with the impact while I was gone that took the form of extra phone calls, emails and a high error rate as our staff attempted to emulate my greatness and failed.

I want to personally assure you that I’m back at work,  although only part-time. That could change at a moment’s notice, however, as I really don’t want to be here. Someone has to keep an eye on incompetent staff and right now that burden falls on me.

–The Manager

CC: Incompetent employees

Note: I’m leaving out the misspellings and other grammatical errors that make the boss look like a high school dropout. I don’t actually have the email in front of me right now since I’m writing this post from home.

There are two things I find very telling here. First, there were no “impacts.” This is pure fiction dreamed up by the boss, apparently to satisfy a need to feel important. Laughably it’s just more evidence that the boss literally has no clue what goes on around here, and, perhaps, has a disturbing skewed perception of reality. Second, what was the point of copying staff on the email? Personally I think the email itself was a red herring. The boss had no real intention of expressing “appreciation” to anyone, much less the suppliers and vendors that he despises. He could care less about them and has said so many times in front of us. No, the email just happened to be a convenient vehicle for putting everyone down. This email was actually intended for those on the CC list, not in the TO field. I’d almost call that clever if it wasn’t so damn obvious.

This week has been a real hoot so far. I can’t wait to see what happens next. Good times, good times.