only then sarcasm is allowed

Art Burshy seems a polite guy, but today he explained me that in some cases sarcasm is allowed...

Art today approached me, dropped his coat on a chair next to me, sat down with a sigh and said
"are they all so stupid or am I so clever...?!, I am pretty sure it's not my cleverness unfortunately..."

Today's story begins with Art Burshy asking his team to come up with new business ideas.
He is pretty new in managing this team and he thought it would be a good way to see what sort of people he has in his team; how skilled are they really when put through the test.

Art loves to ask people to make or rather organise a plan.
It helps him see where they struggle:
1. Some can not visualise their target and their success; ending up presenting no view or a spaghetti of charts that is only successful in confusing people.
2. Some are loners; thinking up new ideas in their geek minds behind the computer; and then presenting it like they go to their school prom, all perky and excited without a grain of reflection.
3. The ones with blind spots as large as the moon; they forget the financials, or they forget to analyse risk or the market trends.
4. Which is all worsened if they decided not to follow any methodology; by itself methodology is not the holy grail. It just helps avoiding obvious large mistakes. So it allows an upgrade in quality without going through the learning curve yourself.

All this helps Art as he says: separate the turtles from the rabbits.
When people start understanding and explaining in a very slow way they hardly ever develop speed, and keep asking for guidance - these are the turtles. There are also people that show a quick understanding, bringing feasible solutions and are ready to do more - the so-called rabbits.
Of course there has been the exceptional case where it seems a turtle was more quick that a turtle, or where there has been a magic transformation, but that in real life never really happens, does it?

Although Art's thoughts seem pretty negative, he in practise always remains constructive; helps people to discover their area of development. He always takes time and hardly becomes angry or negative.
He told me however that his thinking shifted away from where it was when he started managing.
As a beginning manager he would understand everyone and dig all behaviour...but then he saw that some of that same behaviour causes teams to derail after some 2 years.
His conclusion after all these years: if a manager does not clearly show which behaviour is good and which is bad, the consequence is:
- people showing bad behaviour do not get triggered to change
- people behaving in a great way start feeling their efforts are not appreciated.
Result: behaviour shifts to the lowest level.

So that is way this morning with one guy that did not listen Art made some sarcastic remark; and as Art says: "It is okay to fail, but not okay to cover it up with blabla". Only in that case sarcasm is allowed...according to Art Burshy...