I haven’t been working in government departments for long (recent graduate here!), but I’d like to think I’m doing my best, which is usually pretty good, to follow directions from up on high.
Our new team leader has just rolled in, joining us at a time when many different pieces of work are ongoing. He’s a bit vocal, but his growl is more confusing than it is frightening.
He seems nice enough, and he can be quite entertaining, but his instructions are always unnecessarily verbose and so incoherent that no one knows what to make of them or him. All his communications—and there are a lot of wordy emails, long documents, and talking for most of every meeting—are deeply, deeply confusing. Every conversation includes at least one apparently irrelevant anecdote and usually several red herrings that make it hard to figure out what is really important. The work we do is technical and precise by nature, so a minor miscommunication can have significant consequences. Communicating clearly seems like it would be a core capability for his job.
He’s only been at the helm for a few weeks but has already caused of a lot confusion amongst the team. Now people are started to get scolded for doing “the wrong thing”, when the direction he gave us was just really unclear. Needless to say, team morale is taking a big hit. People hesitate to put their work in front of him until they’ve covered their backsides by checking it with a couple of other people first. That means all the work gets stretched out and magnified by multiple reviews because we’re all so confused, leaving less time to do the rest of our work.
I want to do the right thing and do it well, but I don’t know how to raise this is as an issue with my new boss, let alone fix it! I’ve tried paraphrasing instructions back to him, but once he’s finished talking he seems to lose interest and wants to move on to the next thing. I’ve tried sending a follow up email with a couple of bullet-points summarising my understanding of each task, but it’s hard to get a response quickly enough to be useful. I know other team members are having similar problems, and I’m happy to take suggestions – just please make them clear!
