It’s early in the morning (or late at night) when Vital Process A fails. Maybe it errors out. Maybe it didn’t start in the first place. Regardless of the reason, there’s only one thing you can do. Fix it quickly. Fix it quietly. Fix it and whatever else you do, don’t tell the boss.
But… Why not tell the boss?
This morning I logged into work. I need to copy an old database backup to a “protected” drive so it wouldn’t get lost when the backup process cycled through tonight and trimmed the expired backups. As I navigated to where I needed to be, I noticed a missing folder. Annoyed by this, I refreshed Explorer a few times. Still no folder. This folder is created every month end as part of job stuff. So I checked the job and found that it never ran.
Vital Process A, which auto runs in the middle of the night, never ran.
DAMN.
Suddenly my sleepy morning of writing is interrupted as I go full tilt into DBA troubleshooting mode. I check a few more items, verify why the job didn’t run, send an email to my team, my boss, and my boss’s boss saying “I’m calling the vendor now, but, hey, this didn’t happen.” Then I call my boss on his cell phone because it’s New Year’s Day and he’s not checking his email. “Boss, I’m calling the vendor. I’ve got it handled, but there’s a thing.”
The boss is now in The Loop. He tells me to call him when I know more information. He heads into the office because Vital Process A is IMPORTANT while I get on the phone with the vendor and go about getting Vital Process A fixed remotely. Yes, I’m remoting in because I’m a good 30 minutes away from the office and driving there is wasting precious time that V.P.A. could be investigated or running. So I call the vendor, we have our conference and emergency data check, I kick off the V.P.A. and then I call first the coworker monitoring month end jobs, second the boss with the update.
As I write this, V.P.A. is running. I’m babysitting it in another screen. And it occurs to me that what I did this morning isn’t “natural.” IT people don’t call the boss when things go wrong. They just put their fingers to keyboard, keep their heads down, and fix the problem. Which is swell in most circumstances, and not so swell when it comes to Vital Processes.
“Don’t tell the boss.” It’s a survival mechanism, a mantra to keep us from getting ripped over stuff that isn’t our fault (and sometimes stuff that is). I’ve broken stuff before. We’ve all broken stuff before. If you haven’t, it’s because you’re not doing your job correctly, not because you’re a genius. Ask Bill Gates how much stuff he broke before he became a millionaire. Heck, ask him if he’s still breaking stuff. I bet he is.
The point is, “don’t tell the boss” is self-destructive behavior. Mistakes happen and the sooner we fess up to them, the lighter the fallout IF there is any fallout. Now, on minor processes, I fix the problem first (if I can) before I tell the boss. But this is a Vital Process. I don’t fix V.P.s first. I start the ball rolling, tell the boss, then continue with my work.
Why? Because if my boss gets called into his boss’s office to explain why V.P.A. failed and my boss doesn’t know that V.P.A. failed, then he can’t do damage control or give E.T.A.s or situational analysis. And if my boss doesn’t have an answer, then suddenly it isn’t just his boss wanting answers, it is a whole slew of managers, directors, vice presidents, etc. demanding to know what happened. And after my boss gets pulled through the wringer for being clueless, guess who gets called on the carpet and potentially fired?
I’ll give you three guesses and the first five don’t count (me,me,me,me,me,me).
So yes, I broke the code. I told the boss. And you know what? There was no yelling. There was no panic. There was just a “let me know what you need and keep me updated.” My boss is grateful for the heads up. He can start documenting what went wrong and now we have answers before we get any questions.
Plus, come review time, I can honestly tell my boss “Hey, I deserve a stellar review and a raise. Remember when I saved the day by resolving the Vital Process A problem?” The boss will remember I kept him in the loop and made him look good to his boss. And he will remember that I didn’t try to cover up major problems.
So the next time someone says “Shhh, don’t tell the boss,” think carefully. Because it might just be a situation where telling the boss is the first thing you should do.
