Dear Bob ... Why do you suppose a middle manager would ask a subordinate to tell me to call her? I've always wondered why the middle manager doesn't just pick up the phone and call me herself. The first time this happened was in the 1980s. I was having trouble getting a set of purchase orders printed out. My users were the purchasing department. They needed to get their purchase orders printed on a ti Dear Bob …Why do you suppose a middle manager would ask a subordinate to tell me to call her? I’ve always wondered why the middle manager doesn’t just pick up the phone and call me herself.The first time this happened was in the 1980s. I was having trouble getting a set of purchase orders printed out. My users were the purchasing department. They needed to get their purchase orders printed on a timely basis to run their business. This was before the days of the HP LaserJet. Ordinary users didn’t have access to quality laser printing. We had two big IBM 3800 laser printers kept behind closed doors, with printouts distributed into lockboxes. My purchase orders were printed this way. I went back and forth between my users and our IT operations group several times. I must have printed those purchase orders a dozen times, but they never appeared in our box. As time passed, the users became increasingly agitated, and I dutifully started up my chain of command (and the operations supervisor) to tell them we had a problem.The climax came when I showed the VP of fuel purchasing his purchase orders printed on green bar paper. I went across the street to check our box again, and the shift supervisor thrust a laser-printed set of purchase orders into my hand. The fuel purchasing VP had called my IT VP, which finally got things moving.The next day I got a call from the operations supervisor. His boss wanted me to call her, so I did. She scolded me for not calling her in the first place, and insisted that I call her personally if this ever happened again. I meekly agreed. At my current job, this happened again when my application suffered an outage. Both my supervisor and his middle manager were absent that day. It was close to a holiday, and lots of people were out on vacation. I’m one of those poor souls who supports a legacy app. Our current management team can’t take any credit for it, but they take lots of heat whenever it goes down. So of course they view it as a liability. I got an odd call from (would you believe it) the IT operations supervisor. Our temperamental department manager wanted me to come see her. Lucky for me, she knew the outage wasn’t my fault, or I certainly would have suffered for it.In both cases, I’m mystified why these big shots didn’t just call me directly. I suppose if I had a better grasp of office politics, I might have advanced into management myself by now. – PuzzledDear Puzzled …I can answer your question in general, but not in particular. It isn’t uncommon for managers with crowded calendars to have an assistant make the initial call. The reason is less megalomaniacal than practical: With little open time, spending any of it playing telephone tag is less efficient than having an assistant play telephone tag, only getting the manager on the phone once contact has been made. This makes sense from a time management perspective.The other circumstance in which I’ve seen this kind of practice might account for your experience, and that’s respect for the chain of command. Especially in more formal organizations it’s considered a breach of protocol to skip levels, so as a courtesy to the lower-level managers (and so they’re in the loop and know the conversation will take place) a higher-level manager will work through the intermediate levels.This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either. Put yourself in your manager’s place and I think you might want to get the first contact, if for no other reason than to provide some background information that could help the higher-level manager avoid the conversational hazards that come from being ignorant of the circumstances. – Bob ——– Technology Industry