> but you can usually find people in his org who’ll work with you, on the theory that they’re supposed to.
In 100% of the cases where someone has tried this on me, both as the manager and the naive employee, the real reason was that they didn’t care about what the manager/employee was supposed to be doing. They were looking for easy targets who could be abused to do their team’s work. Most of the “manager doesn’t manage anything” accusations came from other teams who weren’t even trying to understand what other managers or teams did. If the other manager or team wasn’t actively working for them in some capacity, they thought the manager wasn’t doing anything.
> It’s true that many of them have long figured out that they’re really supposed to follow orders passed down the hierarchy and do nothing else, even if everything around them is on fire. But some never figure this out, and most managers fail to punish at least some of these slow learners of theirs, so they’re yours to work with.
The most generous interpretation is that this is taken idle employees and putting them to use for the greater good, but most of the cases I’ve seen in real companies are from one arrogant manager spreading their work across any workers gullible enough to do anything you ask of them.
I’ve worked with and hired a lot of really nice people who always want to lend a helping hand. They’re great, but many of them have a real problem handling workplace sharks like this who will saunter over to their desk (or DMs) and persuade them to work on something else, which puts them behind on their own work. When it happens chronically it gets so bad that you have to start checking in almost daily to make sure they haven’t been pulled into yet another team’s workload from a Slack DM or email.
Helping other teams when time is available is a good thing generally. You need to make your manager aware of the incoming requests and time spent, though. Don’t become the person who is working themself to the bone for everyone who comes over with a request but is holding their own team back because they can’t focus on their actual work.