I get a lot of reader feedback when I write about some of the cutting-edge benefits that pop up at many forward-thinking companies across America, whether the perks are spiritual and faith-based services by businesses in Florida, or free food and a highly paid chef to prepare it by a certain well-known technology company in California’s Silicon Valley.
Here’s where this story gets outrageous: “One doctor [working in the state’s prison system] racked up more than $815,000 in unused vacation and on-call pay—the equivalent of almost four years of pay at his final annual salary. When the Mercury News asked for specifics on that massive out-the-door paycheck, a state prison spokesman said ‘there is no way to tell’ when and how the doctor earned all that extra money during his 10-year career.”
And the newspaper also points out a fact that’s obvious to everyone living in the Golden State: “The massive payouts come at a time when California faces unprecedented budget shortfalls and is now grappling with a national financial meltdown and plummeting tax receipts. While labor groups say the workers are simply cashing in what they’ve been owed for years, there’s a huge benefit for waiting: the lump-sum payments are paid at the employees’ current—and, most often, highest—pay rate, no matter how long ago they accrued the time off.”
Worse yet, the state “has no way of predicting from year to year how many employees will retire with huge banks of unused time off on the books.”
The story has to be read to be believed, but here are a few more nuggets:
“The Mercury News analysis of the controller’s payroll figures, which do not include the University of California system or state legislative staffers, also found:
• 36,238, or nearly one in seven, of the state’s full-time workers earned $100,000 or more in salary and overtime in the 2007-08 fiscal year.
• 1,223 state employees earned more than $200,000 in salary and other pay; 19 employees took home $400,000 or more for the year.
• More than 100 of the high earners made at least $100,000 in overtime for the year, including a prison nurse who racked up more than $200,000 in overtime.”
Is there any private sector worker in America who gets to cash out unused vacation like this? I would be shocked if there is a single one anywhere. You get this only in the public sector, where employee unions wield way too much clout and publicly elected officials show way too little backbone to stand up to the never-ending demands for more and more taxpayer-funded pay and benefits that are grossly out of proportion to the actual work performed.
California has big financial problems for a variety of reasons, but the payouts are a big part of the problem. And at a time when our financial markets are melting down before our eyes, they point to a public sector pay system that is hard enough to fathom in good financial times, but now is wildly unsustainable at a time when everyone with a private sector IRA or 401(k) faces having to stay on the job a lot longer than they ever intended.
TO: Laurence G. (Lon) O’Neil, New SHRM CEO and Grand Poobah
FROM: John Hollon, Workforce Management editor and pain-in-the-ass SHRM critic SUBJECT: Welcome, but we need to talk about that big-bucks ad campaign
And that gets me to my first piece of advice: Whatever you do in these first few weeks of your term at SHRM, take a good look at how the organization is spending money. Once you do, I think you’ll see that this huge and pricey campaign to have SHRM “sponsor” election coverage and the presidential (and vice presidential) debates with advertising on CNN, Fox News, Fox Business Network and National Public Radio is a complete waste of time.
Sponsoring debates and election coverage is exactly the last thing SHRM should be spending money on. What’s the ROI for SHRM on that expenditure? My guess is that a strong business type like yourself will be asking those tough questions, as you should be, because I don’t know that they have been asked all that much since Losey departed as CEO.
This will be a challenge, I know, but it’s extremely important that you dive into your new job quickly and take a strong position on how SHRM is spending its money. Vanity campaigns like this one do nothing to build better HR leaders, and in my view, they show just how off-base SHRM is when it comes to using its war chest to drive positive change in the human resources profession.
So that’s my first piece of advice: Follow the money and get a good fix on what SHRM is spending, and why. My guess is that if you do, you’ll have some interesting questions to pose to the SHRM bureaucrats. Plus, you’ll send them a clear message that as CEO, you’ll be one in the mold of Mike Losey—a force to be reckoned with.
When do you take the blame? When do you simply say, “Hey, I screwed up, it’s my fault”?
These are not just rhetorical questions. I’ve been reading a lot on the grilling Lehman Brothers chief executive Richard Fuld Jr. got this week before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the collapse of the venerable 150-year-old financial firm into bankruptcy. Fuld was on the bridge when Lehman Brothers hit the financial iceberg, but unlike Titanic Capt. Edward John Smith, he didn’t go down when Lehman did. Not financially, at least.
In fact, the noteworthy thing to me about Fuld’s testimony to Congress is that he seemed to want to have it both ways, taking “responsibility” for what happened to Lehman while at the same time blaming just about anyone else he could find for causing the financial crisis that led to the company’s demise.
“In sometimes halting language,” The Wall Street Journal reported, “Fuld said that while he takes responsibility for decisions the firm made, he believes that Lehman was brought down by outside forces including lax oversight and ‘short sellers,’ traders who were betting Lehman’s stock price would fall.”
“Lawmakers … questioned Fuld about why he for years failed to rein in risky investments, paid huge severance packages to departing executives even as the company was seeking federal help, and told analysts that the company’s balance sheet was strong five days before it filed for bankruptcy,” according to The Washington Post.
“Fuld blamed the news media. He blamed the short-sellers. He blamed the government, as well as what he characterized as an ‘extraordinary run on the bank,’ ”The New York Times noted. “But the chief executive of Lehman Brothers Holdings, the bankrupt remnant of a once-great investment house, never really blamed himself.”
Fuld made a lot of money at Lehman Brothers: “Lawmakers estimated that Fuld pocketed roughly $480 million in pay since 2000, [although Fuld] suggested that his pay was closer to $350 million in that time,” the Journal reported. He also paid out tens of millions to departing Lehman executives just days before the company filed for bankruptcy. So this makes me wonder: What really is Fuld taking responsibility for? And does taking responsibility equate to taking blame?
The word “responsibility” has a lot of definitions, but the one that hits closest to home for me is that it is a “form of trustworthiness; the trait of being answerable to someone for something or being responsible for one’s conduct.” Blame, on the other hand, is “the state of having caused a bad event; to assert that something or someone caused a bad event; to place blame upon.” But it’s also defined as “to hold another person or group responsible for perceived faults real, imagined or merely invented for pejorative purposes. Blame is an act of censure, reproach and often outright condemnation.”
In other words, Fuld is responsible for his conduct as it relates to his leadership and management of Lehman Brothers, but he’s not to blame for the terrible things that happened to the company, at least not in his own mind. And this is precisely the kind of response that makes reasonable, common-sense people ask: Just what was it that Lehman Brothers was paying Richard Fuld those hundreds of millions of dollars for anyway? Was it to blame others for things that happened on his watch and with his blessing?
For most people, blame is something that comes with responsibility. When you are responsible, you get the blame—or in better times, the credit—for all the things that happen in your area of responsibility. That’s how it goes in the real world of management, but unfortunately, that’s not how it works on Wall Street.
I wish for once that some high-level executive, somewhere, would say, “Hey, it was my fault. I screwed up big time. And by the way, I don’t deserve that big financial package I’ve been getting. You should take it back.”
That’s a pipe dream, I know. But if we are ever going to get serious about affixing blame and holding people responsible for bad decisions and actions they take, someone needs to take the first step and fall on his sword. Too bad it couldn’t have been Richard Fuld.
Maybe it’s just me, but frankly, I’m tired of the nonstop bashing of the Millennial generation.
I wrote about this in March in my Last Word column (“Millennials at the Gate”), and I marveled then at how so many managers seem to want to demean and dismiss the youngest (born between 1980 and 2001) and largest (80 million) generation in the workforce as nothing more than a group of self-involved, unmotivated slackers.
That’s why the latest survey by career site Jobfox of more than 200 recruiters about their perceptions of job performance across generations is so maddening. According to the survey, only 20 percent of recruiters considered Millennials as “generally great performers.”
By comparison, 63 percent of the recruiters polled said baby boomers (43 to 62 years old) were great performers, 58 percent gave high marks to Gen X (29 to 42 years old) and 25 percent for traditionalists (63 and older). Gen Y was also classified as “generally poor performers” by the largest number of recruiters polled. Thirty percent of recruiters classified Millennials as poor performers, followed by 22 percent of recruiters who classified traditionalists as poor performers, 5 percent for Gen X and 4 percent for baby boomers.
I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t surprised by these numbers, given that Millennials are the youngest and least experienced employees in the workforce. Is it any great shock that this Jobfox survey shows an inverse relationship between age/experience and performance? My guess is that the baby boomers who fare so well in this survey would have been rated about the same as Millennials if a similar survey had been done, say, around 1978.
Rob McGovern, the CEO of Jobfox, also believes that Millennials get a bad rap, and that it is corporate leaders—not Gen Y professionals—who need attitude adjustments.
“Businesses must shed negative perceptions and learn new ways to incorporate Gen Y views into the workforce,” McGovern said in a press release about the survey results. “The companies that succeed over the next two decades will be the ones that can most inspire Gen Y. This is the most educated and technologically savvy generation ever.”
It’s also the generation that’s going to drive innovation and practices in the workplace for the next 50 years. It is actually a little larger than the baby boomer generation that has dominated things for the past 25 years, and so it will slowly ease those workers out of the picture.
We wrote about how to get the best out of Millennials earlier this year here at Workforce Management, and it’s a good article to reread in light of the Jobfox survey. But more than that, we need to have an attitude adjustment about these younger workers. For better or worse, they are our future. And are they any worse than any of us were at the same age? That’s the real question I wish these surveys would get to.
Here are the elements: A 79-year-old control-freak owner (Raiders managing general partner Al Davis) who has gone through eight head coaches in the past 14 years looking for a puppet who can read his mind and do his bidding without question, hires a 31-year-old college assistant coach with a reputation as being too cocky for his slim résumé, and, makes him the youngest head coach in the history of the National Football League. The cocky young coach isn’t a yes man or a puppet, however, and soon he is butting heads with the control-freak owner.
Guess where this one ends—with the nasty, public firing of the cocky young coach, of course, but only after many months of media speculation on when the control-freak owner would actually get around to it. And over the many months of media speculation, the cocky young coach turns into a mouthy young coach who seems to relish giving the media many of the details of his situation with the control-freak owner. That’s what makes the public firing all that much nastier.
“Al Davis did the worst thing possible,” wrote San Jose Mercury News columnist Ann Killion. “He dumped all the dirty, disgusting laundry out in front of the television cameras and microphones and notebooks. And the stench was awful. … Davis confirmed it all. Not only all the rumors and whispers that have been building for the past 20 months about his deteriorating relationship with Kiffin and all the little grudges held. But Davis also confirmed the Machiavellian, paranoid nature of his rule. He is an owner who sends his coach—a man who was in his office from dawn to dark every day—a Federal Expressed three-page letter of accusations to create a paper trail so as to have evidence in court. … Davis has hated Kiffin for a long time … yet he allowed the situation to fester and grow and distract his team while he was Fed Ex’ing letters and documenting ‘lies and propaganda.’ ”
Coaches get fired all the time, as do business executives and managers at organizations big and small. Sometimes those terminations are there for all to see, but usually the protocol is that these departures are about “leaving to pursue other interests.” That’s not how Al Davis does it. “It didn’t have anything to do with winning,” Davis said in the San Francisco Chronicle. “It had to with personality. It’s the first time I ever let anyone go based on what I call just being a flat-out liar.”
Is this how to fire a person? Of course not, but don’t think that this kind of over-the-top abusive behavior is confined to professional sports. I once worked for a guy who rivaled Al Davis as a control freak. He was an entrepreneur who also wanted yes men and puppets, and he hired and fired generations of managers who tried to exercise a little independent thinking. He wouldn’t stand for that, of course, and he seemed to revel in the power he had to fire people and make them feel powerless.
There’s a special place in hell for people like that. It makes me wonder: Why would anyone want to publicly make it clear that he is a bully and control freak, more consumed with revenge and hurting someone than he is with building character and strength in his organization?
If anyone has a good answer to that question, I’d love to hear it.
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