The importance of a good Cruise Director

It is my ever unchanging opinion that the role of cruise director (organizer, leader) is important to any type of group activity be it business or leisure and that any person who immediately volunteers or vociferously seeks this post should be locked out of the room and only let in once the agenda is set. Almost every time there is a person who actively seeks this role, they turn out to be a control freak know-it-all who only ensures that nothing gets done or that nobody has any fun.

Traveling in large groups for leisure can be difficult because if there is no set agenda, like on a cruise, it can be difficult to come to consensus on what to do. This kind of situation can even get worse when there is a group of people that don’t know what they want to do and can only disagree with what anyone else wants to do. This is a problem and needs some kind of cruise director to keep things moving along or else the entire trip will consist of people staring each other exchanging “I don’t knows” and being bored.

The aggressive type is the wrong choice as cruise director for leisure because they never seem to have the capacity to mitigate disagreement or consider all the options with regard to the people involved. It always seems to be the case that the aggressive types only consider what they want which invariably is the opposite of what anyone wants so the cruise director seems to think they deserve and of course do not receive any appreciation because everyone else is miserable and having no fun.

In business the cruise director is tasked with “herding cats”, taking disparate groups within a single company or multiple companies and focusing a project so that it adheres to its scope and deadlines. Individual companies and IEEE type working groups assign titles like project or program manager and offer courses like six sigma which gives out karate like “belts” for attending courses on and adherence to high-minded albeit vague principles.

Adherence to vague principles and reams of work-making paperwork to track that adherence seems to attract the overly bureaucratic control freak type, the worst possible choice for the business cruise director. Meetings will be absolutely wasted with discussions about philosophies, inane policies, leverage, platitudes (rabbit holes anyone?), synergy, adherence to irrelevant project management guidelines and discussions about how to appropriately talk about the project while never actually discussing the topics of the meeting.

The bureaucratic project manager is quick to jump to conclusions and always seems to proclaim a mastery of subject matter before it can be explained to them by actual people in the know. They completely monopolize meetings (which always go over time) by attempting to referee discussions when it is not warranted and incorrectly reiterating everything that is said by any party because they believe that they are the only person that really understands all viewpoints while the really understand nothing. In the end the participants are frustrated, hopelessly behind and wishing for the project manager to contract laryngitis or some kind of flu.

Inadequate cruise directors are the bane to anything getting done anywhere. In the leisure sense it leads to a rash of boring outings and indecisiveness. In business it’s entirely to blame for projects taking way too long to complete and costing much more than necessary. Many projects only get done entirely in spite of bad cruise directors. It is important to either get in on the ground floor and be a part of the selection process in the beginning or be wary that you will either regret not staying home or be sick of platitudes and never be able to get any work done.