Empowerment or enslavement?

At a Christmas gathering, a group of us chatted with “Graeme”, a maintenance engineer on a remote mining site. He described his living conditions and the challenges of fly-in/fly-out employment. When I asked him his standard work hours, he laughed and said his shift was 12 hours (7 to 7). His wry chuckle was, he explained, in response to “standard”. He often worked much longer. On his last “tour”, because the second engineer was unavailable, Graeme one night worked from 7am till 11pm. After finishing, he drove back to camp, showered and got to bed at 1am. At 3am he was awoken by a call from his duty manager, “Steve”, asking him to come back to the mine. A key piece of equipment had failed and stopped production.

At the site, Graeme found that to fix the problem he’d have to work 15 metres up a ladder, in poor light, repairing an electrical cable. This was risky work at any time, but more so as he was fatigued. Steve told him Graeme that he didn’t have to do the work (a second engineer was due at 7am); the decision was Graeme’s.

Graeme was conflicted; common sense, health and safety regulations, and company policy said “no”. But he was new to the site, and was worried about being seen to cause four hours of lost production.

Resignedly, Graeme agreed to do the work, but was very glad when the other maintenance engineer finally arrived to take over.

Most listeners to Graeme’s story thought he made the correct decision. I disagreed. I saw this as a dereliction of duty on Steve’s part. It was his job to make the decision, enforce policy, and protect his team member. Instead he chose to put himself and his company (even though the risks to both were high) above Graeme’s safety.

Afterward, I thought about Graeme’s predicament and realised that this situation, where a manager abrogates his responsibility by offloading it onto staff, is quite common. I’ve experienced this – and am almost certainly guilty of it – a number of times in my career (although not with such potentially serious consequences).

Have you had similar experiences? Why do some managers choose the “easy” (wrong?) option in such circumstances?