The Game

Over the years I've had periods in my working life where it's been difficult to get out of bed and go to work in the morning. I've generally done it because to me not doing it is the start of giving in.
Sometimes the difficult period is caused by the work itself, but more often it's caused by a particular manager.
A few years ago a mate of mine told me that when he has a difficult manager he makes a game out of the situation. He had a boss once who used to have an explosive temper. When he was angry he would be very verbally abusive and rant on about how the subject of the rant didn't care, was incompetent, doesn't know what's going on, isn't trying, hasn't checked the basics, hasn't followed up, and more. He would start off speaking a bit louder and then work himself in to a full on yelling rage. Either in person during a meeting, or on a phone conference. My mate worked at the same company in a different team. I had a few encounters with the yeller and was the subject of a couple of his outbursts. My mate told me afterwards about the game technique. He and some of his colleagues made it a game to see what would set the Yelling Man off. They deliberately wound him up and waited for him to crack.
The Yelling Man was a well known serial offender that even HR would not do anything about. They would deal with me if I was half as abusive just once. I guess that's because the General Manager effectively pays the HR staff and if not has a significant influence in their careers. Whereas they wouldn't know me from the next pleb and would jump at an opportunity to make an example out of me - good for their next performance review. So I don't feel sorry for him at all. I guess it's a bit of a risk involving other people in the game. It wouldn't be well received if someone spilled the beans.
Out of this I learned a new "coping" technique; to make a game of something negative. Often I try to guess what part of something a pedantic manager won't like. The font, colours, too "verbose", not enough detail, put it in a table, or a chart, or "I'll look at it later". When I get the feedback, I hi-5 myself and have little internal smile and walk away.
A while ago I inherited a new boss after the old one moved onto new things. He was difficult in different ways to the yeller. My game was to observe how he reacts with me and other people. His words, body language, and actions. It takes the frustration away from my job and I have re-enforced a lot of behaviours to avoid. I'm lucky enough to sit quite close to him. When I turn around I'm looking at his back so I see people as they walk up to and away from his desk. Most of them approached him as if they were creeping up on a sleeping lion. Either with fear in their eyes, or full of false bravado to slaughter the beast with their bare hands before they get mauled to death. They almost always walked away defeated. Nothing they had done, or could say, was good enough; they were useless.
I've worked for this person before and he was a large part of the reason why I changed roles at the time. For the past few years he was a peer of mine, and while he still had a few signs of old school management style, and a lot of ineffective personal skills, I thought he had improved. It turned out that our mutual manager had been keeping him under control. When he was off his lead he went back to his old ways but about ten times more extreme. After the first few weeks, his manager came to me and asked for feedback on him. I told him that he had been given plenty of feedback in the facial expressions, body language, the way people walked way looking defeated, and that he probably couldn't work out why nothing went the way he wanted it to. You don't need feedback from me. If he couldn't pick up on the feedback that I saw him get there is nothing that I can say that will make a difference. It was a very frustrating few months before it came to an end with another change in my career. The game of observation and inner laughter at his bumbling relationship destroying and completely ineffective management made my days bearable.

People and objectives

I took far too long to learn that most managers simply don't care about anything that's not on their development review objectives, or is of interest to their manager.

I used to wonder why we'd spend tens of thousands more dollars to get work done sooner that could have been done for a fraction of the cost next week, or next month. As well as this, most managers don't care about preventing risks from becoming issues unless they have senior management attention.

It dawned on me during a performance review discussion when I was trying to explain how much money I had saved doing something a different way, how it prevented a future issue (risk mitigation), and increased the delivery rate.
The project costs had already blown out due to a massive scope versus cost and time misalignment in the planning phase, or the lack of an effective planning phase. This meant saving money was not important to him because everyone knew it was going to be well over budget by a lot more than the amount that I had saved. It was the same with the time, or delivery rate. It was well known that we could not deliver the project at the rate that was originally expected. So like my cost savings, my relatively small productivity gain was of no interest. I feel kind of silly for not realising it a long time ago. For a long time I've been working on the basis that it's always good to save money and time providing quality and scope is maintained and there are no other undesirable consequences. I think in a well disciplined organisation the two would align and it would work well for me. My focus on costs and time would align with my managers objectives and what they would get measured on so they would appreciate and recognise my contribution to their hopefully favourable review. That company was not at all disciplined. I could rattle off countless examples of State differences due to undisciplined managers and lack of leadership, ad-hoc unmanaged changes including constant changes to the metrics, no effective process documentation, conflicting and unachievable directives, and an "old boys club" in the background guarded by a paddock full of sacred cows.

Need

Is "I need" the worst way to ask someone to do something?

I thought so.. as in "I need you to fill in this template". Just saying "fill in this template" may look worse at first but I don't think it is.

Now I think just "need" is worse. Yep, this is what really happened to me one day. An email from my manager, "Need this filled in by COB today", with a spreadsheet attached.
Not even "need you to fill this in by COB today". Let alone a please thrown in to at least make it look like a polite request.
On top of that, the template was far from self explanatory and there was no attempt to provide the context or ultimate objective of the exercise.

Not surprisingly, what he received wasn't what he wanted, or needed.
I prefer to use "would you please...?" followed by the context or as I've heard it called "commanders intent". That way there is a good chance that anything not clear in the instruction will be cleared up when they read the objective. It also helps them feel part of the bigger picture and gives them an opportunity to add their thoughts. Funny thing is that when he sent the email I was sitting about 10 feet from him in talking distance. When I read it about 10 minutes later, he was gone so I couldn't ask for some more details. Not just gone to a meeting or something, packed up and gone from the office.
Now if I was a smartarse, I could have just ignored it. He wasn't asking me to do anything, just making a statement on something that he needed. I could have replied, "OK, good luck". But I'm not always a smartarse, so I polished my crystal ball and did what I thought was required.
I can't help thinking the next step didn't work out for him and wondering if he threw me under the bus. As in: Oh, I'm sorry I didn't get that done because I was let down by Harry. Was that his plan all along? Not enough time to explain it to me, or he didn't know what had to be done, so he set himself up with a nice little excuse. Obviously I won't know but I can learn from the experience and make myself a better person out of it.

There are two reasons I don't like "need" at work. A need is something you almost can't live without, or at least something very important. As in "I need food", or "I need help with my homework".  It's also something that requires the other person to care about enough to want to help. In a work situation, if a respected collegue was in a position where he could lose his job and needed help, I'd probably ask how I could help and do the best I could to help them. On the other hand, some jerk who needs help to protect his false image is going to get the bare minimum that their role power deserves.

Getting Sacked

My first real full time job was from half way through 1985 to I think 1989 when I was sacked. I was given a job to do by a salesman. The information was not very clear so I asked a question about it. It was a fairly typical question that comes up from time to time about the specific size of the product. He told me to stop being smart and to do my fucken job. It was a bit out of character for him because I usually got along with him fairly well. He wasn't the nicest person, but he usually wanted to get things done properly. I can't remember exactly what I said but it was something along the lines of "well if it doesn't matter I'll just average it out and it will be OK". I probably said it with a shitty tone in my voice. I was annoyed. I realise now that I was, and probably still am, a type C person who likes clear instructions and will then do a good job - possibly too good if it takes too long. Fuming a bit, I went and did the job, it wasn't difficult and probably took me half an hour, maybe an hour if I had some distractions. In the back of my mind I was worried it wasn't exactly what the customer wanted but it would have to do. I went home and came in to work the next day and had pretty much forgotten all about it. I really didn't think it was that much of a big deal and I thought I was doing the right thing asking. And I wasn't asking to be smart but I appreciate now that it may have looked like it to someone else. My boss, the production manager met me as I was walking up the stairs and told me I was sacked for misconduct yesterday and to get my things and leave. He walked me to my desk, I got my things took them to my car, and left. As I drove off the song on the radio was "Eternal Flame" by the Bangles. I was shattered emotionally and felt angry, sad, ripped off, confused. I enquired about unfair dismissal with the department of labour and industry but they pretty much said that misconduct is an acceptable reason to sack someone. I'd need to argue it wasn't misconduct if I was to challenge it. And he made it sound like misconduct was doing anything that your employer didn't like. When I look back, he was a public servant and there would not likely be any repercussions for him if he talked me out of pursuing it, whereas he would have had to do some work if I pursued it.
Obviously I've thought about it a lot since then.
The salesman was a dominant person in the company and controlled people by role power and fear of being sacked. He was a bully. I was confident in my job because I did a good job. I added a lot of value to the company in many ways. I was right to ask. The problem was that it put his credibility and authority at risk in front of other people. His credibility was being questioned. Why didn't he know the details of the order that were required in order for it to be completed? And his authority; how dare someone question him and then comment that his response was not helpful.
There was a good lesson in that. Often just being right isn't enough. You also need to deal with it in the right way, and I didn't. It sucks that there are people like him around, and it's the way it is. Dominant bully type people are more likely to be in positions that control people; that's what they like and they're often seen as "the ones who get the job done". They have to protect their "image" and keep people in line. Otherwise they will lose control. Role power and bullying is all they have.
The sun came up the next morning. Life went on. Almost straight away I got another job via a mate of mine.  In a strange twist of fate I ended up working for them again for a brief period later on but that's part of another story.