Frisbees and hula hoops both came out when I was a kid, and at about the same time.

A year later almost nobody seemed interested in hula hoops, while Frisbees have thrived as a perennial favorite for forty years or so as a cross-species success. (Memo to Frisbee Corp: Invent new model made of diaper material to absorb canine saliva.)

Some management “fads” are more durable than others, too. One in danger of following the hula hoop is employee involvement.

The idea of employee involvement is pretty simple: If you’re making a decision that affects someone, they may have intelligent ideas to offer, and you’ll benefit from hearing them.

There’s a useful adjunct to this idea. If you’re making a decision that affects someone, asking for their ideas is a matter of simple courtesy.

If I’m reading the tea leaves right, this thought process has started to lose its luster among managers at all levels. Based on what I’ve been hearing, there seem to be two basic reasons for disenchantment with it.

The first reason — the one managers emphasize — is that it’s inefficient and wastes everyone’s time, including the employees we’d been involving. Even worse it causes unnecessary anxiety, leading employees to worry about what might happen when instead they can toil away in happy ignorance until management is ready to tell them the answer. (For the record, I’ve never once heard any employee thank a manager for keeping him or her out of the loop, but I’ve heard quite a few managers congratulate each other for this fine logic.)

Management’s retreat from involvement probably comes from our having made it a panacea. Many of us applied it indiscriminately to every possible decision. Worse, we confused it with consensus decision-making, so every departmental decision took time away from work and took a long time to make.

There is, I think, a second reason managers have started to retreat from involvement, and it isn’t pretty.

Many who aspire to management do so because they desire power. Wanting power (that is, the ability to influence events and outcomes) is neither good nor bad. It’s why you want the power that matters. It doesn’t take a psychotherapist to realize many managers want power because they were bossed around earlier in life.

These managers want their turn, and having to involve employees in decisions takes away from the emotional satisfaction of making decisions and making them stick.

They want to be the boss because they want to boss people around. It’s their turn.

This group of managers either washed out during the empowerment and involvement fads of the past decade, or they learned to paste a smile on their faces, getting even with everyone by instituting the appearance of involvement while actually ignoring every idea offered to them by employees.

The survivors are removing their velvet gloves, revealing their rusting iron fists and unpleasant personalities.

They’ve mistaken Frisbees for hula hoops. Right now we’re dealing with the best employment market in twenty-five years, at least as far as employees are concerned. Unpleasant managers will retain only those employees too inept to be hired by good companies or too afraid to start looking. Companies that allow these managers to dominate their ranks will slowly crumble as their best talent leaves for better working conditions.

Involvement doesn’t have to mean holding hands and singing Kumbaya. It’s more a matter of simple courtesy, asking peoples’ opinions before making decisions that affect them.

So in the cold hard world of commerce, simple courtesy gives your company a big competitive advantage.

Is this a great country or what?

I’ve held nearly every job you can hold in IS, and in twenty years I’ve never worn a pager.

Some of this was dumb luck. When I worked as a programmer, for example, none of the applications I supported ran as overnight batch jobs, so that eliminated one source of pager-itis.

For the most part, though, I carefully planned my freedom from being on-call. When I managed networks and telecommunications, for example, I remained pager-free, even though we ran a 24×7 mission-critical operation. How?

Every time the subject came up I asked the same question: “What would I do about it?”

The team always had analysts on-call if something went wrong. They wore pagers. I slept until the next morning.

“What if they need you for something?” one of my colleagues once asked.

“Like what?” I asked in return. “They know what needs to be done, they’ll make the right decisions, and if anyone questions their authority they can explain that they had no choice — they couldn’t reach me because I don’t wear a pager.”

If I’d worn a pager I’d have had to justify it, and that would have meant insisting on being beeped every time something went wrong. And that, in turn, would have drained the authority right out of my team.

Even worse, I would have lost a lot of perfectly good sleep.

A lot of first-time supervisors treat their newfound authority to make decisions the way a child treats a new Pez dispenser. It isn’t the decisions (candy) that matters. It’s the process of delivering them that’s fun. (As evidence: At a recent “Nerd-fest” thrown by my friends Faith and Lynn, Fitz demonstrated his new motorized Pez dispenser. This is a killer gadget, kids. Ask Mom and Dad to get you one!)

These supervisors either learn the key lesson of career advancement or they’re perceived to be front-line supervisors the rest of their lives, even if they reach middle management. That’s the oldest lesson of succession planning: Always be important, but never be essential.

A regular theme of this column is the distinction between managing well, managing effectively, and succeeding in your career. Managing well refers to how you manage staff. To manage well, you have to delegate well, giving decisions to the people who report to you. Otherwise they can’t grow.

Managing effectively means making sure your department gets its job done well. That means you’re responsible for people and processes, not making decisions. The fewer decisions you make yourself, the more effective you are as a manager.

And then there’s the minor matter of your career. To be promoted, you need to pass the following tests: (1) You should at least resemble being qualified for the position you want; (2) You must have created the appearance of having been effective in your last job; and (3) You must be easy to replace.

This is neither original nor profound, but it is hard to accept. That’s because being hard to replace is a key survival strategy for many employees. And it’s a good one if your goal is job security. If that’s your goal, in fact, you should avoid sharing information, skills, or anything else that helps someone else do your job in your absence.

If, on the other hand, your goal is advancement then you have to treat succession planning as a personal mission. Delegating decisions makes you upwardly mobile. Your department can function effectively without you, and probably includes several qualified replacements, too.

Here’s the irony: Some managers get the silly idea that managing well and effectively is what got them promoted.