The Managerial Grid

In the last century, soon after I moved to Brookings, I settled into employment teaching life skills to developmentally disabled adults. Fancy stuff like preparing basic meals and how to sew a button on a shirt. We also wove rag rugs and made quilts. It was an interesting and challenging job and I enjoyed it. Occasionally one of the upper management staff would attend some type of workshop and return to share the amazing crap he had learned and enlighten us greatly. Actually it was more like confound, puzzle and amuse us. These were reactions we hid behind expressions of earnest interest while slightly nodding our heads. It seems some of this stuff is still clogging up my brain. This afternoon a memory of something called the managerial grid rattled loose from where it had been hiding. Our esteemed assistant director drew a diagram on the blackboard*. Apparently to illustrate different styles of management among those who, well, manage. He paused as if for comments or questions. There were none. As he replaced the chalk in the tray he indicated his sketch once more, saying, briefly, that's the managerial grid. I remember his presentation but still have no idea what he was talking about.   Other people have drug flashbacks. I have training seminar flashbacks. I bet the drug flashbacks don't make a heck of a lot of sense, either. But I bet they're more entertaining.

*Yes, children, before there were dry erase boards in classrooms there was something called a blackboard. The really ancient ones were slabs of slate attached to the wall. They were written on with chalk. Really cool teachers had various colors of chalk to liven things up. Think sidewalk chalk. The music teacher had a special gadget that held five pieces of chalk right in a row so he could quickly and evenly draw a music staff on the blackboard. It was a magical time.