Oh, I want to copy this and make the shift leaders read it aloud...

So, I got a copy of The Bluejacket's Manual from Amazon. It's pretty much the handbook on how to do stuff the Navy way. And it's frequently abbreviated BJM. BJ, he he.

So I've been reading it, and I've gotten to the part about leadership. Here's a bit:

Know your job. Few things are more uninspiring for subordinates than to recognize that their leader does not know her or his job. As a leader, you will earn confidence and respect of those who work for you if you know everything you can possibly know about your job. You should also strive to learn as much as you reasonably can about the jobs of your subordinates, but use this knowledge to improve your communications with subordinates, to instruct when necessary, and to monitor what they are doing. Do not use this knowledge to intrude on their work.

Oh, I want to copy the whole section and give it to the managers at McDonald's.

I hope it just keeps getting better.

Incompentence

I'm going to be blatant. The store manager at the McDonald's I work for is ultimately incompetent.
I don't mean she's a bad person. Personally, I rather like her. Nor do I mean that she is mentally impaired in some way. She just doesn't have the skills to run the store well, and if left to her own devices (that is, some of the shift managers stopped supporting her and telling her what to do), it would be a likely disaster. And sometimes it is a disaster, even if she is supported.

One of the Point-of-Sale computers (POS, sometimes we call them pieces of shit) had been malfunctioning. Instead of calling in the problem directly, she stuck a note on it, "don't use this." I wonder, did she think it was going to go away? Anyway, I was pushing a bit for her to call it in right now, so if we needed to do a system reset, it would be at 5 in the morning. She was unsure, and so she waited for a more competent manager to come in and weigh the situation.

Unfortunately, the next manager didn't come in until 8am. They agreed that yes, they needed to call this in, and as it turned out, they did need to do a system reset.

Oh, that sucked. System resets take at least 45 minutes, and according to the franchise rules, we weren't allowed to close for this. So for about an hour, we were taking orders by hand, figuring out the seven percent tax, keeping a log of what was ordered. During what's usually a busy breakfast hour.

It wasn't as bad as it could've been. I was given the task of taking orders and figuring the prices for drive thru. I've paid enough attention that I know most of the menu items' prices including tax, but there were a couple times where I had to compute the 7%. I'm sure I got something wrong during that hour, but generally things (at least from my perspective) went about as smoothly as you could hope for.

Judging by my coworkers, though, it could've been a disaster. One girl insisted on having a calculator for finding the change. Another gave out free things, and later got in trouble for it. One was amazed by the arithmetic that decorated my orders. To me, it's just simple math that I've had a lot of practice doing.

A manager is in a position of power and authority; however, without input from the people who are in their authority, it would be hard to have a grasp on what's really going on. It's a reciprocal kind of relationship, since a manager can't manage without talking to and considering the opinions of their "followers," and the "f0llowers" need an authority in order to function as a unit.

I learned all this at band camp. I have a feeling it will be reinforced at boot camp.