In one of his best posts in a while, Seth Godin discusses “Sheepwalking” which he defines as “the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain dead job and enough fear to keep them in line”.
Have you ever sheepwalked through your job? I can think of a few example where I have:
1. At one job I had to use the correct color of paper when I filled out a request for raise for someone I managed. There were two types of raises and both had their own color! If the paper arrived on the wrong color of paper, it was sent back to me do over. When I asked why the color of the paper mattered I was told the person who opened the mail wanted the raises to stand out from the normal mail.
2. My first job out of college was managing a retail store. I had the authority to set the schedule of 10 to 15 employees I managed but I wasn’t able to set my own work schedule. I was told the exact days and hours I would work every week. The part-time seasonal help I hired had a more flexible work schedule than I did.
3. Another company I worked for banned instant messenger programs on the basis that employees would chat too much with friends and spread viruses. This same company would send out random emails to the entire company asking if anyone had seen the missing typewriter or filing cabinet.
4. A company I worked for years ago hired a guy to work on increasing the traffic to our website by building community. But one of his first jobs was to determine how much money our company was spending by providing free soda.
5. I was in charge of increasing sales of computer training on our website. When I mentioned we rework the site to make the purchasing path more consumer friendly I was told to increase the font size of the phone number on the website so that more people would call us. Our sales department closed at 6 pm on weekdays and was closed weekends. If you happened to call in an order during the times we were closed you were sent to voice mail. When I asked who pulled the voice mails (and potential orders!!!) I was told that nobody could remember the password to access it.
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