I used to see a former colleague - I'll call her Terry - enter the office in the morning. I rarely saw her leave at night. The reason I always saw her, is that my office was across for the cube farm she worked from. Well, actually, she did part of her work from the cube farm, apparently lots of her work was from home. She was hard to miss when she arrived at the office. Her hand truck, with milk crates attached, and papers spilling from it drew my eyes from whatever I was doing.
When our employer at the time won several awards for being "a great place to work", many in the media speculated that since we were a public company, private equity organizations would be looking at how they could get rid of the "fat" that was being used to make it such a great place to work, and pocket some big money.
Suddenly, our employer woke up from the sugar high of good times, and decided it didn't want to be taken over. To avoid it, they had to turn utopian "Wonderful Worklandia", a great place for all people, into a lean and productive organization. Sadly, Terry was one of the first round who were fired. All of those trips she took, laden like a Sherpa with her necessary work, was all for nothing. Whatever she was working on, it wasn't really all that important. The time she stole from her family - nope, not important. At least she had a hand truck and some milk crates at the end of the day. Unless they were company property, in which case they probably ended up in the mail room, where there was a legitimate use for these cargo tools.
A couple months later, as the workload increased on the remaining people, a colleague came to my office, slinking in, trying not to be seen. "Hey Bob, can I tell you a secret?" He really wasn't waiting for an answer. "I'm giving my notice. Wait until they hear I'm leaving. This place will be so SCREWED!". I leaned back in my chair, pen to mouth, and said "Dude, I hate to break the news to you, but 5 minutes after your name is out of the Outlook Global Address List, people will forget who you are". He looked like I slapped him. "No, you don't understand, I carry the workload for my department.". He left the company, a week later, no one remembered what he'd done there.
A few years later, I was working for a company in the trough of dysfunction. It was private equity backed - the money grabbing, "where's my pile of dough" private equity. When I showed up, the person leading the company had a mandate to build a dynamic and growth-oriented organization. It was an exciting place to be. We were movers and shakers. There were more smart people running around that place than I ever worked with. The collective intelligence there could have solved the problems in the Middle East, ended hunger, and cured cancer. It was an exciting time in my career.
Then one day, it may have been a Monday, or a Tuesday, but it doesn't matter, a small team of even smarter people from our head office showed up. They had occupied several conference rooms and most of the HR area before anyone came to the building. As I settled into my office, several of my employees came in with the look of fear on their eyes. "What's happening? I just heard Person Leading Business Unit was fired, so was entire Department of Really Smart People, as well as the entire Department of Even Smarter People".
I was having my own hard time with what I had seen, and realized this wasn't the time to be motivational. It was infantry time, get in the foxhole and wait it out (not that I ever have done this in real life). "I don't know what's happening. But whatever it is, the decisions are already made, and if we are getting cut, there's nothing that worrying will do for us. I'd recommend you go to your desks and start working. Don't gawk, don't get sucked into any protests in the aisles, and we'll know soon enough what the plan is." I made a quick round of our area and provided this advice to the rest of our team.
At the end of the day, there was loads of empty office space. Employees who had invested their life's work, as well as new people who were full of hope for our collective future were sent packing. Some of them cried loudly, wailed, and threw their useless high performance awards into the hallways. Some of them had collections of house plants, pictures, yellowed creativity awards from decades gone by, and drawers full of important stuff that was now headed to the recycling bin. It was a sad day, but the people remaining were full of a new kind of relief. We made the cut. We were worthy of keeping our jobs.
For many people, they were suddenly moved from working in a large department, to leading a small department. There were lots of opportunities for these people. Some made it from manager to director, which is a very large move. There are way more managers than directors, and the competition was very tight for the positions. But not that day. That day directors were made. I was already a director, and within a week or so, my span of control had widened.
Things settled into a new normal. At least for a short time. Then one day, the new business unit leader pulled out his machete (figuratively speaking), and began to whack vice presidents. As this happened, my reporting structure was moved from one person to another. One day, my newest boss was in my office talking to me about project management. She suddenly looked at her watch, and said "I have to run. I have a meeting with Big Boss. I'd like to come back and finish this discussion afterward. See you in a little bit!" She hustled out of the office. I never saw her again. By that time, the leadership learned not to let people pack their offices during work hours. They returned after office hours with security and a human resources person to pack their desk. I missed working for her, even though it was only a week or so that we had the pleasure. Actually, the pleasure I derived from the experience was totally self-serving. Her office had a large pine tree outside of the window, and as she dragged out tattered and time-tested cliches about business management, I could see Cedar Waxwings frolicking in the tree. Those were great meetings. I love a good view of a Cedar Waxwing.
When you work in an office where career death is all around you, there comes a time when you realize that no matter what you do, your time is coming. As soon as you ran out of ideas, or your salary looked too high, WHAM! your were done. Used up, and out back with the recycling bin. Stoicism is one way to defend our minds from this.
I never saw it coming. I had a meeting on my calendar with Big Boss. It was in a conference room, and only 15 minutes long. The subject of the meeting was missing, or so innocuous that it was unmemorable. I arrived a minute early, with my pad and pen, taking a seat facing the door. Right on time, Big Boss walked in, with HR Tool right behind him. HR Tool was a friend, and I knew how tough her job was. Firing people on a regular basis can't do much for your spirit, although I will say that Big Boss always looked titillated on firing days.
I'm not one to suffer fools, and don't like a drawn out speech. I also don't sit well, so I spoke first. "I guess I know what this means, you're here to fire me." HR Tool nodded solemnly on the surface, but I am sure she felt some sense of relief that it was already stated, and she still had a job. "I'm disappointed. We were building something good here, and I truly thought that I was a valuable member of the team, and that I had proven what we could do as an organization." Big Boss looked at me, like I was the dead ground hog he had nailed to a tree and proudly showed me at a company picnic at his house. The ground hog was "an example to the others", and surely keeping the other ground hogs away. Big Boss the Impaler. But I digress.
Big Boss turned to me, and said "we have a traffic manager position open, it pays less, but you can have it if you want". I asked if I could have a day to think about it. He agreed. I drove home that night, and as soon as I saw my honey, I told her the story. I said "FLOCK him! I will not take that job that pays tens of thousands of dollars less to do the same work". She looked at me, and did what she always does, calmly laid out the situation. "We just bought this house, the pay for that job is more than unemployment. You will go in and thank him tomorrow, take the position, and then find a new job." As the head of the household, I stood my ground and firmly said "yes dear".
The next day I went in, hat in hand, and took the job. A couple of months later, the company reinstated me to my old position with my old salary. But something had broken. What was broken, couldn't be fixed. Trust. Once trust is broken, all of the kings horses, and all of his men can't put it back together. It took me a few months, but I left. I learned a lot on that job, and from the experience of working in that environment. Some of our greatest lessons are learned from the bad stuff that happens in life. Not all learning is accompanied by the sounds of trumpets.
Here are some of the pearls I learned for your consideration:
When our employer at the time won several awards for being "a great place to work", many in the media speculated that since we were a public company, private equity organizations would be looking at how they could get rid of the "fat" that was being used to make it such a great place to work, and pocket some big money.
Suddenly, our employer woke up from the sugar high of good times, and decided it didn't want to be taken over. To avoid it, they had to turn utopian "Wonderful Worklandia", a great place for all people, into a lean and productive organization. Sadly, Terry was one of the first round who were fired. All of those trips she took, laden like a Sherpa with her necessary work, was all for nothing. Whatever she was working on, it wasn't really all that important. The time she stole from her family - nope, not important. At least she had a hand truck and some milk crates at the end of the day. Unless they were company property, in which case they probably ended up in the mail room, where there was a legitimate use for these cargo tools.
A couple months later, as the workload increased on the remaining people, a colleague came to my office, slinking in, trying not to be seen. "Hey Bob, can I tell you a secret?" He really wasn't waiting for an answer. "I'm giving my notice. Wait until they hear I'm leaving. This place will be so SCREWED!". I leaned back in my chair, pen to mouth, and said "Dude, I hate to break the news to you, but 5 minutes after your name is out of the Outlook Global Address List, people will forget who you are". He looked like I slapped him. "No, you don't understand, I carry the workload for my department.". He left the company, a week later, no one remembered what he'd done there.
A few years later, I was working for a company in the trough of dysfunction. It was private equity backed - the money grabbing, "where's my pile of dough" private equity. When I showed up, the person leading the company had a mandate to build a dynamic and growth-oriented organization. It was an exciting place to be. We were movers and shakers. There were more smart people running around that place than I ever worked with. The collective intelligence there could have solved the problems in the Middle East, ended hunger, and cured cancer. It was an exciting time in my career.
Then one day, it may have been a Monday, or a Tuesday, but it doesn't matter, a small team of even smarter people from our head office showed up. They had occupied several conference rooms and most of the HR area before anyone came to the building. As I settled into my office, several of my employees came in with the look of fear on their eyes. "What's happening? I just heard Person Leading Business Unit was fired, so was entire Department of Really Smart People, as well as the entire Department of Even Smarter People".
I was having my own hard time with what I had seen, and realized this wasn't the time to be motivational. It was infantry time, get in the foxhole and wait it out (not that I ever have done this in real life). "I don't know what's happening. But whatever it is, the decisions are already made, and if we are getting cut, there's nothing that worrying will do for us. I'd recommend you go to your desks and start working. Don't gawk, don't get sucked into any protests in the aisles, and we'll know soon enough what the plan is." I made a quick round of our area and provided this advice to the rest of our team.
At the end of the day, there was loads of empty office space. Employees who had invested their life's work, as well as new people who were full of hope for our collective future were sent packing. Some of them cried loudly, wailed, and threw their useless high performance awards into the hallways. Some of them had collections of house plants, pictures, yellowed creativity awards from decades gone by, and drawers full of important stuff that was now headed to the recycling bin. It was a sad day, but the people remaining were full of a new kind of relief. We made the cut. We were worthy of keeping our jobs.
For many people, they were suddenly moved from working in a large department, to leading a small department. There were lots of opportunities for these people. Some made it from manager to director, which is a very large move. There are way more managers than directors, and the competition was very tight for the positions. But not that day. That day directors were made. I was already a director, and within a week or so, my span of control had widened.
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| Cedar Waxwings add a new dimension to meetings |
When you work in an office where career death is all around you, there comes a time when you realize that no matter what you do, your time is coming. As soon as you ran out of ideas, or your salary looked too high, WHAM! your were done. Used up, and out back with the recycling bin. Stoicism is one way to defend our minds from this.
I never saw it coming. I had a meeting on my calendar with Big Boss. It was in a conference room, and only 15 minutes long. The subject of the meeting was missing, or so innocuous that it was unmemorable. I arrived a minute early, with my pad and pen, taking a seat facing the door. Right on time, Big Boss walked in, with HR Tool right behind him. HR Tool was a friend, and I knew how tough her job was. Firing people on a regular basis can't do much for your spirit, although I will say that Big Boss always looked titillated on firing days.
I'm not one to suffer fools, and don't like a drawn out speech. I also don't sit well, so I spoke first. "I guess I know what this means, you're here to fire me." HR Tool nodded solemnly on the surface, but I am sure she felt some sense of relief that it was already stated, and she still had a job. "I'm disappointed. We were building something good here, and I truly thought that I was a valuable member of the team, and that I had proven what we could do as an organization." Big Boss looked at me, like I was the dead ground hog he had nailed to a tree and proudly showed me at a company picnic at his house. The ground hog was "an example to the others", and surely keeping the other ground hogs away. Big Boss the Impaler. But I digress.
Big Boss turned to me, and said "we have a traffic manager position open, it pays less, but you can have it if you want". I asked if I could have a day to think about it. He agreed. I drove home that night, and as soon as I saw my honey, I told her the story. I said "FLOCK him! I will not take that job that pays tens of thousands of dollars less to do the same work". She looked at me, and did what she always does, calmly laid out the situation. "We just bought this house, the pay for that job is more than unemployment. You will go in and thank him tomorrow, take the position, and then find a new job." As the head of the household, I stood my ground and firmly said "yes dear".
The next day I went in, hat in hand, and took the job. A couple of months later, the company reinstated me to my old position with my old salary. But something had broken. What was broken, couldn't be fixed. Trust. Once trust is broken, all of the kings horses, and all of his men can't put it back together. It took me a few months, but I left. I learned a lot on that job, and from the experience of working in that environment. Some of our greatest lessons are learned from the bad stuff that happens in life. Not all learning is accompanied by the sounds of trumpets.
Here are some of the pearls I learned for your consideration:
- Everyone can be replaced. Deal with this. Even you can be replaced.
- In organizational restructuring, the line managers have little if any say in who gets let go. Your dedication, good humor, office decor, and the fact that you wash your hands after you use the bathroom will probably have little or no effect on whether you are on the hit list.
- Big severance packages only exist in government jobs and movies. Chances are you will be given a couple of weeks pay on the condition that you sign away all of your future independent thoughts to the company letting you go as a condition to receive the grocery money severance.
- Worrying about your job will do nothing to keep you in your job.
- If you are using a hand truck to take work home with you, the message you are probably sending is that you are so inefficient in the office that you need most of the nights and weekends to get your work done.
- Few companies measure productivity by person, most measurement is at the department level. Extraordinary efforts are great for the team, and we should all be making these efforts, but this alone won't save you when your time comes.
- At the end of it all, the quality of our life is related to the quality of our relationships.
Have I missed anything? Please share your thoughts in the comment section.
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i used to work at a similar company, with a similar Big Boss. he too seemed to have an extra spring in his step on his firing days. Being one of his top level managers, i was always 'in' on who was getting the ax and usually had the displeasure of having to do the swinging of said ax.
ReplyDeleteIt was the most unpleasant atmosphere i have ever worked in. very unhealthy for all invloved, except for big boss of course. I hated the way he treated his employees. I finally had enough one day and actually walked out. something i have never done and it was a hard decision. It turned out to be the best thing ever, because i found a job 2 weeks later that was my dream job. i love love love my current job and am so happy to be away from the horrible place that sucked the life out of me for 5 years.
We should compare names, maybe it was the same person. The ground hog story is true. He killed a ground hog, and nailed it to a tree at the edge of his property. He also kept his dogs in a fenced area with his vegetable garden. Once I saw that, I never accepted "fresh" produce from him again. (-;
ReplyDeleteThe rationale that was always used, was that by decreasing staff we were protecting the rest of the staffs' jobs. But the process always lacked respect for the dignity of the human being getting sent to the door.
A boss will have to do difficult things, but a leader will do it in a way that is compassionate.
Glad to hear you found your dream job, few of us find it! I am thankful for the bad job, it puts other jobs in perspective, and makes my career much better as a result.
Here is a comment in the form of a blog: http://mattydale.blogspot.com/2011/05/downsizing-as-sport.html
ReplyDeleteBack before the cube farm era I worked in a large, open, barn-like room crammed with desks, drawing boards, and a couple hundred a-hole & elbow drones. Our project was for NASA's planned lunar mission, subcontracted to a giant photographic products firm. You'd recognize their name in a second. Despite being fully staffed, and having no room for additional bodies, there were new hires reporting every Monday morning. They were there to replace the ones who were summarily discharged the previous Friday by Big Eddie, our feared and fearless leader. There seemed to be neither rhyme nor reason to the firings. The workload was fairly constant. It wasn't necessarily the poorest performers who were axed.
It always went down this way: At 3 pm on Fridays, Big Eddie would stroll down the aisle that divided the room, his fat head oscillating like a desktop fan (something we weren't allowed to have, even though their was no A/C nor windows). Every so many steps, Big Eddie would stop, fix his gaze upon his intended target, and wiggle his "come with me" finger. The doomed worker would know he had to follow him to a small alcove in the rear of the room, where he and his fellow soon-to-be ex-colleagues would get nothing but a "Need I say more?" from Big Eddie's smirking mouth. That was the condemneds' cue to get their coats and vacate the premises, pronto.
One Friday, Eddie entered the room for his 3 pm purge, and we saw him give the look and crooked finger to someone we all thought was too well connected to fear being chopped. The guy's face turned ash gray, his jaw dropped as he had visions of starvation, foreclosure and destitution, when all of a sudden, Big Eddie cracked a grin and waved him off. "Just kidding!" That's when it became obvious that this was just sport for the management. The turnover harmed, rather than helped, this job get done correctly and on-time. But it must have been fun, because they kept doing it. We knew that if we escaped the Friday Reaper, we could count on another week of the fairly high wage we were earning.
Years later, I saw an ad for Big Eddie's estate auction. He had died in his recliner, watching TV, surrounded by filth and garbage, piles of empty junk-food bags and beverage cans, and he sat there for weeks until the postman alerted the cops. Eddie's mail was piling up, along with the daily papers. Though Big Eddie's Cadillac was in the driveway, the mailman's knocks went unanswered. I went to the auction out of curiosity, just to see how this odd creature lived. The house was a mess. It was clear he had done nothing to maintain it following the death of his mother, who shared the home with him for many years. I thought the auction lots would consist of things like torture racks, medieval weaponry and human fingers strung on a necklace, but Eddie collected comic books.