Serving Two Masters: Dividing Your Attention Without Diluting Your Efforts

"I have eight different bosses right now... So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it." -- Peter Gibbons in the Mike Judge film Office Space, as portrayed by Ron Livingston. "The President has only 190 million bosses. The Vice President has 190 million and one." -- Hubert H. Humphrey, 38th Vice President of the Unites States. While very few of us have suffered the fate of Office Space's Peter Gibbons (with his eight oblivious supervisors), working for multiple bosses within the same company has become a fairly commonplace situation nowadays as matrixed organizations consolidate, shrink, and reorganize. Often these situations last just a few weeks or months; however, sometimes they become permanent. Administrative professionals … [Read more...]