Giving the Work Back

Abstract

Every answer a manager gives teaches the next question, and returning a question is design, not withdrawal. It is ten to ten on a Monday, and the manager of a customer support team at a software company has just answered the fourth question of the morning. It arrived, like the other three, as a message in the corner of her screen: a customer wants a refund outside the policy window, and can the team give it. She has answered this question, in nearly these words, perhaps a dozen times since the summer. The answer is usually yes, with a note on the account. She types it again. The message disappears, and another arrives, about a different customer, and it is the same question. Beside her keyboard is a notebook with the week's priorities written on the first page, under Friday's date. The first of them is the proposal to her own manager for how the team should be organised next year. It is half a page long. Across the open-plan floor, her twelve people are working steadily and well, and every forty minutes or so one of them waits for her before doing the next thing.