The Art of Demotivation - In Practice

Everyone has done it.  Parents to children.  Coworkers to colleagues.  Friends to eachother.
Everyone has occasionally called someone by the wrong name or briefly failed to recall the name of the person they are looking at.  I'll admit to being terrible with names of people I've newly met.
But it felt more nefarious when a manager at work called me by another name recently.

This will be the second consecutive post which relates to work - and I don't write about work.

I'm in a position which is both enviable and worthy of sympathy.  My management at work doesn't really care about my role.  They've made that abundantly clear by ignoring an increasing percentage of stuff related to what I'm working on in the nearly two years since I moved into my current job.  There are still some check-the-box HR exercises and I still talk with them, but my job is largely a bottomless void.  Bottomless void also implies that something rolls downhill - and it does.
This is enviable since it means they largely leave me alone.  This is worthy of sympathy since it means I'm quite sure I'm superfluous.  Or perhaps more realistically, I'm doing work which needs to get done - and the best possible outcome from a management perspective is nobody hears about it.  I may be a hairs breath away from being ignored right out of a paycheck.

I sometimes wonder if I may be slipping into the nothingness described in Harlan Ellison's short story "Are You Listening?"  It describes a man so mundane and average that he loses his existance - until he meets another man of the same fate.  Maybe there are other people at work who nobody has seen for years, but continue to dutifully show up every day.

David Bolchover writes about this in his book The Living Dead:  Switched Off, Zoned Out.  Mr. Bolchover was employed for years, where he freely admits he was doing almost nothing.  He relates that he was largely forgotten about.  There is another distinct possibility in that his management may have thought it was easier to give Mr. Bolchover unlimited freedom and a paycheck, rather than deal with his situation.  One thing I've learned over the years is that management really are human, and with the same limited energy to deal with difficult situations as everyone else.  If something isn't an immediate problem, ignoring it until it either becomes one or goes away may be a viable strategy - even if a feeble one.  A third possibility is that Mr. Bolchover could be a painful person to work with.  I've never met him and know nothing about him.  But I've seen difficult people be sidelined with roles that basically separate them from the normal population.  The corporate equivalent to solitary confinement.
Regardless, his point is a real one.  How much of the work going on is critically important?  It is too easy for the tasks to expand to fill the time, rather than the time being well used at the work that needs to be done.
I have stuff to do.  I'm competent at most of it, good at some of it.  But the overall management sentiment seems to be one of ambivelance.

I don't read many work/management books, but in addition to Bolchover's The Living Dead and Fisman and Sullivan's The Org (a highly recommended book which helps explains why large organizations devolve into the same painful, gelatinous mass), I read E.L. Kersten's The Art of Demotivation with great interest.
I'm really not sure how to classify The Art of Demotivation.  The book explains how to get more out of employees by demotivating them to a level somewhere just above the ground snail.  I'd like to believe Kersten's The Art of Demotivation is a completely satirical look at the pop culture of management books, celebrity business people, and self-help about how to "do more with less" as a manager.  But I can't.  I have seen far too many of Mr. Kersten's techniques practiced at work and far too often.  Sadly, I suspect many of the proletariat in a global corporation could say this.  So while it may not be a serious how-to book for up-and-coming managers, it may be a third person how-I-got-here for too many managers.

One of the strategies Mr. Kersten suggests in a couple of different places in the book is to "forget" the names of subordinates - and to do this frequently.  Employing this strategy, he even demonstrates this gem in the Acknowlegements:
"I also need to give credit to my research assistants Robert (or Roger?) from Massachusetts and the redhead with the eyebrow piercing.  They tracked down numerous references, checked the accuracy of quotations, and were a constant source of inspiration.  Naturally, any errors and omissions in the final manuscript are their fault."

So given the current ambivalent demotivation at work, when my manager called me the wrong name, in writing, I raised an eyebrow.  He has known me for well over five years.  We've worked close enough in the past that we've nearly come to fisticuffs (slight exageration).  Making it worse, he called me by the name of a colleague who is leaving the organization.  And his subsequent follow through was nearly delayed enough to be irrelevant with silence since.

But I won't complain.  In a training earlier this year, the speaker, who is both interesting to listen to and the rare individual who is actually motivating, said that he wanted, "...the most important project that is not on management's radar."  I'm definitely not there, but I can still revel in being left alone.