While a good manager can mitigate the problem by cultivating mutual trust, individually and culturally, the problem gets compounded when hierarchies become nested, and the org scales beyond the Dunbar Number.
a consultant can talk to the ceo as an equal.
however, a consultant can also talk to the mail clerk as an equal.
One of my friends runs a market research firm that works for big retailers. She says 90% of their work is about producing evidence for the decisions that have already been taken - so they can be implemented without causing complaints.
It is not humanly possible to be knowledgable in all the fields of people working directly or indirectly under you. Good managers are not always technically knowledgable . It is useful skill to have, neither it is most important nor is it even essential.
While bad managers tend not to have the knowledge, the worst managers are strong technically but don't have other critical skills needed for the job.
But as a manager, you need to know what your organization is doing and you need to know who to ask.
That is, by very definition, the job of a manager.
Some maintenance guy who works the floor knows they don’t need two of them but no one will listen.
There is still room for a highly paid consultant.
Large car companies like GM or Ford hire automation companies to build automation equipment that meets a very specific spec for assembly steps, tolerances, rates, etc. They design components with ease of manufacturing as a significant factor. How something will be assembled is a constant consideration while designing. The product being run on these lines never really changes and human are only used when the the operations are so complex that the equipment doesn't pay for itself in (typically) 2 years. This is very rare, mostly people are only there to keep the machines filled with parts.
In the sequence of
design -> automate -> manufacture
Fictional employee. Fictional scenario. But you still assume that the employee isn't smart enough to know why bolts are different sizes and whether a bigger bolt could work in the place of the smaller bolts.
You assume you know more about this fictional car than the fictional employee actually (um, I mean fictionally) building it.
You should apply for management.
Reductively it's CoW snapshots + chroot.
Guess I need to find a new job.
People don't have to hyper-specialize to one specific role.
> There's really no reason to think the person turning the bolt necessarily knows what size the bolt needs to be.
and also steel-manned the final sentence like this:
> In the same way a web dev doesn't need to know how docker works
As such, the (claimed) existence of one person who regularly uses very different skills doesn't disprove what I think jacobsenscott was trying to say.
Example using the same logic as the post we're discussing: Someone flips a coin in another room. It doesn't necessarily have to be heads, so we should assume it's tails.
It sounds like you are not familiar with this disaster:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse
There may be a very good reason things are the way they are.
Sometimes they were blindingly obvious things. One employee would drive two bolts, quickly change heads, then drive a third bolt. While the carcass advanced to the next station, the emloyee would change back to the original head and be ready for the next carcass. That employee's suggestion: Make all three bolts the same size so I don't have to change heads.
Of course, that is just a fun anecdote. All such efficiencies have been implemented long ago... for auto assembly. But the point is still valid. Your employees know a ton about your business. Even the ones who do the most mundane tasks. Listen to them. Or... pay a very expensive consultant to listen to them.