Here’s a managerial role no one really wants to get assigned to—Designated Punching Bag.
You know what I’m talking about: It’s the person on the management team that seems to be the one who always gets handed all the bad stuff, the really horrible assignments, or, is the bearer of bad news. This often means this person is also the one who is forced to take a disproportionate share of verbal abuse—from clients, vendors, the staff and sometimes even from other executives up to and including the CEO.
“For the past six months,” the Post story said, “Kashkari has been a face of the government’s financial rescue and a sponge for congressional anger over the program. Although he scrambled to get the rescue’s operations running, often sleeping in his office and working seven days a week, during hearings lawmakers questioned his competence. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, D-Maryland, once called him ‘a chump.’ ”
The Post recounts the first time Kashkari was called to testify before a congressional oversight committee and how he coped with getting raked over the coals repeatedly for four hours by the committee’s chairman, Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, D-Ohio. Kashkari’s answer was to place “an index card on the table in front of him with the words: ‘The louder he yells at me, the calmer I will be.’ ”
As the Post story indicates, it’s not always bad to be a Designated Punching Bag. Sometimes, an organization needs someone to be the lightning rod for criticism.
Organizations will frequently designate someone with good diplomatic skills to work with angry and hard-to-deal-with clients, or with prickly vendors, or with all manner of difficult people that you just can’t ignore or get rid of. This is a role that a lot of labor mediators frequently play when a union and management are squabbling over a new contract.
But sometimes, managers become involuntary punching bags for their bosses. This can be a role they eventually accept as part of their portfolio, or, it can simply deteriorate into an abusive, one-way relationship. I’ve served in both capacities, although not by choice.
In the first case, I was the editor of a moderately sized newspaper and worked for a publisher who was fairly new to her job. She was desperate for the paper to improve and frequently got frustrated with the pace of change. When that happened, she would sometimes come into my office yelling and would proceed to ball up the newspaper and then throw it at my head before stomping off.
I know this sounds bad, but the silver lining to it was that my publisher would come back about an hour after her temper tantrum and would apologize for being out of line and reacting the way she did. Although I hated her reacting the way she did, I always respected my boss for being adult enough to come back and offer up a sincere act of contrition. To this day, I admire her for the willingness to apologize and admit her mistake.
That’s one way to be a punching bag. Another way, as I found out, is to deal with a superior who is just flat-out abusive and mean. I dealt with a guy like that at another newspaper where I was called on the carpet just about every day by a glowering thug who had no discernable skills except his ability to bust a union. He was threatened by me because I was popular with the staff and, frankly, could manage rings around him.
No one deserves to be a Designated Punching Bag, and it speaks to the incivility in our modern society that people still are forced into this role. My guess is that Neel Kashkari will be happy to get away from the Treasury Department’s bailout operations and back into a position where he gets treated with a little less abuse and a bit more respect.
There’s “no question” his job was a trial, Kashkari said of his time at the Treasury Department. “But … I also learned about myself, how to bring a team together and to get the team to perform under unbelievably trying circumstance,” he said. That’s the tough part for all managers, and the trick is to do it without being mean or abusive and hopefully, without the need for a Designated Punching Bag.
I’ve worked in businesses that were building up and I’ve worked in businesses that were paring down, but the worst of all was working at a business that was desperately trying to hang on and keep going even though the management team could see the writing on the wall.
Yes, it sucks when you work for a company that you know is dying, but as bad as that is, there’s something a whole lot worse: recruiting and hiring new people to come work at the dying company without letting them clearly know what’s going on.
I was thinking about this while reading about the closing of Conde Nast’s Portfolio, a $100 million-plus investment in a new glossy business magazine that has now gone down the tubes. Sad as it may be when a business gets closed down—and it really bothers a longtime journalist like me seeing so many media properties dropping dead at a faster and faster clip—it’s even sadder to see that Portfolio was still hiring new employees and bringing them on board as recently as two weeks ago.
What’s wrong with this picture? One Planet Money reader hit it squarely on the head: “[This] doesn’t sound like ‘bad luck’ so much as a corporation recruiting someone while not caring that they’re possibly going to damage his career. Conde Nast should have known better than to let Portfolio bring people on while they were working on shutting the magazine down.”
Amen to that, I say. As someone who toiled as an executive trying to keep things going while the company I was working for was slowly closing down, I know just how hard it is to keep up appearances that all is well with the organization even though you know that the day of reckoning is fast approaching. It’s a tough job, and I’m sure it wasn’t easy for the people at Conde Nast.
But I also know this: No one in their right mind continues to recruit and hire new staff and bring them on board into such an uncertain environment. I’m sure I’ll get a boatload of BS from some recruiting professionals who believe you need to continue the hiring process no matter what shape the company is in, but in my mind, doing that is just wrong, pure and simple.
In this situation, Conde Nast must clearly have known that time was running short for Portfolio. There were rumbles about the publication going under in the relative good times of last fall, when the magazine cut back to 10 issues a year and gutted its online staff. Anyone who follows media with half a brain knew that Portfolio’s financial situation was dire, so why was the company still hiring new editorial staffers and encouraging them to give up good jobs somewhere else to come on board the ship right before it went down?
In other words, why would you ever want to hire people away from a stable job situation into one as precarious as that at Portfolio? Some will argue that blogger Avent was a big boy who made his own decision and should have known better, but I don’t buy it.
Conde Nast is one of those companies that people in the magazine and journalism profession long to work for, and it is very possible that blogger Avent was blinded by Conde Nast’s past success and blue-chip persona.
In my book, departing managers don’t hire people when they know they’re leaving without clearly disclosing to the potential employee EXACTLY what the situation is, and companies that clearly have one foot in the grave don’t lure new employees away from good jobs to board the Titanic for a short, scenic cruise.
I’d love to hear what recruiters have to say about this, but I fear that I’ll get the predictable response—that you must keep recruiting and hiring until the day a company closes its doors, blah, blah, blah. Anybody who believes that may find they succeed at recruiting, but in my book, they ultimately fail in the larger, and much more important, game of life.
The five-month study that was conducted for Intel by the Michigan-based Ponemon Institute, “examined 138 laptop-loss cases suffered over a recent 12-month period by 29 organizations, mostly businesses but also a few government agencies. It said laptops frequently are lost or stolen at airports, conferences and in taxis, rental cars and hotels.”
“About 80 percent of the typical cost—or a little more than $39,000,” according to the Mercury News story, “was attributed to what the report called a data breach, which can involve everything from hard-to-replace company information to data on individuals. Companies then often incur major expenses to prevent others from misusing the data. Lost intellectual property added nearly $5,000 more to the average cost. The rest of the estimated expense was associated with such things as investigative costs, lost productivity and replacing the laptop.”
As staggering as the $50,000 figure is—if you really believe it—even more staggering is the variation in the dollar loss for stolen or lost laptops that were included in the study. The individual losses associated with stolen or lost laptops in the study varied from a reasonable (and understandable) $1,213 to an out-of-this-world (and hard to believe) estimate of $975,527.
Wonder about the reason for the huge variation in lost-laptop costs? According to the study, “The faster the company learns that a laptop is lost, the lower the average cost … If a company discovers the loss in the same day, the average cost is $8,950. If it takes more than one week, the average cost rises significantly to approximately $115,849.”
That still doesn’t explain the near-million-dollar estimate for a single lost laptop, but it does explain why Intel linked up with the Ponemon Institute for this study: It’s because the computer chip maker has recently developed technology that companies can use to make notebooks harder to steal. That technology, according to the Mercury News story, can help make a laptop inoperative when it is lost or stolen.
Clearly, organizations have a strong interest in protecting their proprietary information that workers may have on their laptops, and Intel of course has a vested interest in marketing a technical solution to the problem. But as I have noted here before, there are a lot more ways that sensitive company information can walk out the door—such as when workers lose their jobs and decide to take it with them.
There is another solution: strong and specific HR policies that clearly delineate how employees are to handle their laptops and the sensitive information they may have on them. Too few organizations focus on that aspect of the problem, and it’s why you hear so many stories of a worker having their laptop filled with company and customer data getting stolen out of the back seat of their car.
Intel’s technical solution is a good one, but the skeptical side of me says it’s just an easy way to avoid having HR truly manage this problem with strong policies, training and an everyday focus on the issue. And, no technical solution can possibly account for human nature and the inherent ability of humans to do something stupid at the worst possible time.
Without strong HR involvement in managing the lost laptop and data security side of the equation, all a technical fix does is lull workers and management into a false sense of security about this problem—until a crisis erupts when the next lost laptop gets breached.
If there’s anything good you can say about the terrible economic downturn we’re in, it’s this: Tough times force people to make tough decisions that they might not otherwise make. And that’s why I’m happy to find so many corporate boards that are finally showing some backbone and killing one of the most insidious and pernicious executive perks of all—the executive “gross-up.”
I can’t think of a single executive benefit that more clearly delineates the huge gap that exists between top executives and their employees. In my mind, it’s an egregious benefit that gives full meaning to the phrase “the rich get richer,” and I say that as someone who once received a gross-up and felt guilty about it.
Here’s the gist of what I’m talking about, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal: “As the recession fuels outrage over executive-pay excesses, 43 companies in Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index will stop paying certain taxes for their top brass this year, according to a review of 2009 regulatory filings for The Wall Street Journal by compensation-research firm Equilar Inc. The change comes amid increased investor criticism of the ‘gross-up’ payments, which cover the tax bite for a variety of perks, including club memberships and personal use of corporate jets, as well as golden parachutes following takeovers.”
Yes, let me make this perfectly clear: It’s not enough for top executives to get country club memberships and personal use of the corporate jet as part of their compensation package. In addition to those goodies, the company agrees to add to the executive’s pay in order to cover the additional taxes that might be payable on such a perk.
This is one of those hard-to-believe benefits, and I was stunned the first time it happened to me. It was back in the early 1990s when I went to work for newspaper giant Gannett as editor of the company’s statewide newspaper in Great Falls, Montana. The company paid for my move from Southern California, and one day, the HR director came by and handed me a check for something like $3,000 to cover taxes I might have to pay as a result of my relocation.
I was flabbergasted, and asked him what I had done to get this. He said it was just corporate policy for all executives. It happened to me again a few years later when Gannett transferred me from Montana to Hawaii as executive editor of The Honolulu Advertiser. The gross-up on that move was more in the $5,000 range, as I recall, but both times I was left wondering why the people making the most money should have their taxes covered on some really great benefit. It just didn’t make sense then, and it still doesn’t.
So, why does it continue? According to the Journal, “Companies say gross-up payments are sometimes necessary to recruit executives … but activist investors contend that tax reimbursements represent another example of treating the top brass like royalty. ‘There’s no pay-for-performance connection at all,’ says Richard Ferlauto, director of corporate governance and pension investment at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union. ‘All Americans are subject to taxes except executives who have found a way to avoid them.’ ”
The silver lining in this story is that many corporate governance experts believe that elimination of the executive gross-up will spread. Many boards, according to the Journal, view the present economic environment as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to remove abusive compensation practices, says Patrick McGurn, special counsel for proxy adviser RiskMetrics Group Inc., which recently added gross-ups to its list of poor executive-pay practices.”
Executives need to be paid fairly, but the system has gotten way out of whack when the top person in a company gets paid 300 or 400 times more than the average floor worker the organization. I don’t think any reasonable person thinks that makes sense, and the gross-up is just more of the same. It’s a benefit for someone who doesn’t need more benefits, and who can damn well pay taxes on the ones they already get.
If McGurn is right, and boards are indeed whacking away at lousy executive pay practices, we can only hope that the gross-up is one of those pernicious perks that end up, finally, on the cutting room floor.
Hey, Management Guy! Is it ever good for a high-level executive (maybe even the Big Boss) to admit to being wrong? I think it’s a good idea because it shows people that the boss is human and fallible just like everyone else. But then again, I can’t remember any executives actually doing it. What do you think?
— Chili from Chicago
Chili:
A few years ago, The Management Guy worked for a crazy entrepreneur who made tons of insane, shortsighted decisions. He was wrong about something just about every hour of the day, every day of the week, but he never, ever would admit any culpability for his terrible judgment. He never took responsibility for anything, although he was fond of offering a faux apology of sorts when something went really bad. When that happened, he would chalk it up to “trusting that (Employee X) was capable of stepping up to the challenge.”
Of course, this is hardly taking the blame—it’s simply blaming the employee, again, in a backhanded way, sort of like a job candidate saying in an interview that their greatest weakness is working too hard. It’s rhetorical BS, pure and simple.
The Management Guy has worked for lots managers, executives and Big Bosses over the years, and he can count on one hand the number of times any of them truly admitted they were wrong. That’s why so many fall back on rhetorical devices that sound like they are taking blame when in fact they are simply passing the blame buck to somebody else. They do that because they believe that taking blame makes them look weak and unleaderly.
Yes, Zell told Bloomberg Television that his heavily leveraged 2007 acquisition of Tribune was “a mistake,” but only because he did not anticipate the steep decline in the newspaper business. “By definition, if you bought something and it’s now worth a great deal less, you made a mistake, and I’m more than willing to say I made a mistake,” Zell said. “I was too optimistic in terms of the newspaper’s ability to preserve its position.”
Yes, Zell is a horrible manager and was wildly optimistic when he made a bad deal to buy a business he knew virtually nothing about, but he won’t ever cop to that. He thinks, like too many other bad managers, that there’s no upside in accepting blame or apologizing—that would take character and backbone and a strong sense of right and wrong. And as much as many business executives want to claim they have those qualities, there’s a whole lot of them who don’t have any idea what they really mean.
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