It is not just this LSE, it's all LSEs, in interaction with IEEs. I don't blame them, it's the activity dynamics in action, it is about effects unspoken, you could discuss is, but it would rear its ugly head nonetheless. They probably get frustrated by my expectations just as well: they simply can't keep up with the big picture perspectives I suggest to them. It seems like they seem to get it, but in practice it is beyond their capabilities to act upon it.
This is how it works: there is a problem with planning, at some moments the work load, especially Monday morning when everything has to be made from scratch, is sky-high. So I suggest a different way of working, anticipating high workloads upfront, whereas the average LSE would respond to a high workload simply by speeding up and working harder, but from my perspective this a a way of working reactive, instead of pro-active, something that involves not only extreme work pressure and stress, but also risks, because: what if someone calls in sick? What if unexpected orders come in? Lunch has to be ready by 11:30, no matter what! This is what happened the past few weeks: with an epidemic of flu, one person after another called in sick, causing extra work load for the rest of us, and missed revenue because some products could not be made in time. 11:30 is the unavoidable deadline!
My suggestions to spread the load and reduce risks did not seem to fall on deaf ears with the chef. I am in charge of preparing the salad bar, and I suggested that instead of preparing it in the morning, I would prepare it at the end of the day and not leave until it was ready. This has two advantages: the risk is reduced and I do not have to work towards a hard deadline of 11:30. I can use this lack of deadline to produce larger batches of food, reduce the number actions on individual tasks, in effect, work a little bit more upfront to save large amounts of time later during the week. The focus is now on preparing food, not on meeting a deadline. The chef likes it, let me do my thing,
but does not seem to keep up his end of the bargain, which is that he has to organize the rest of the kitchen to make this possible (e.g. stock up in time and in the proper amounts, because when he orders 8 pounds of mushroom when I asked him for 16, it means I have to prepare them twice when I could have prepared them in one go tor two days). Ergo, I put in a lot more work, but because things are done ineffectively elsewhere (i.e. more responding to events than anticipating them), all time saved on my behalf is used by others to save them time, such as other 'stealing' stuff from my
mise-en-place to prepare sandwhiches, which solves their problem, but they forget that it creates a new problem for me. Not to mention that the chef sends more work my way, when my intention was to reduce my hours to the 30 hours per week I want to work. I thought we already had an agreement that I would work 30 hours this week, but somehow the chef seems to think that the work which took me 40 hours last week, can also be done in 30 hours without him making provisions for the 10 hours I am supposed to work less (i.e. extra hands).
Now what I want to stress here, is not that LSEs are bastards, idiots or whatever, they aren't. What I want to show here, is the dynamics between IEEs and LSEs in the work place, how this interaction leads to misunderstanding and wrong expectations in both directions. He can't match my expectations, and I can't match his. This is what leads to mutual exhaustion: physical for the IEE, and psychological for the LSE.