But, there’s always a caveat emptor quality to a lot of this research. That’s because you never really know how well the survey was set up, whether the questions seemed to have some bias and led respondents to certain answers, or even if the group surveyed was really one that would generate a meaningful result.
And there’s something else as well: Sometimes people aren’t completely honest in their responses, even in anonymous research. For example, I’ve been seeing a number of surveys indicating that lots of businesses are poised to bring back salaries and wages that have been cut or rolled back this year, but that sounds a lot more definitive in the surveys than it does when you talk to real executives about their plans.
Could it be that no one wants to admit, even in an anonymous survey, that 2010 is going to be another bad year of holding down pay?
So, that’s MY caveat emptor to these two surveys that seem to be directly contradicting each other. See what you make of them:
According to the survey, more than 80 percent of the respondents say their companies are headed in the right direction, while only 15 percent think things are headed the wrong way. Nearly nine in 10 employees believe conditions will be better or the same a year from now, and only 12 percent say they will be worse.
In addition, respondents to the survey report very high levels of job satisfaction, with nearly 80 percent saying that they are extremely or somewhat satisfied with their current jobs, while only 9 percent are extremely or somewhat unsatisfied. Given the choice, nearly 90 percent of the employees say they will be at the same job six months from now. The employees cite job security, stability, pay and benefits as the primary reasons for their satisfaction. The survey was carried out among a cross section of 500 U.S. full-time workers who have been employed for at least one year at companies with 100 or more employees.
“The study provides a barometer of employee engagement in the workplace, with results that might alarm and surprise many employers,” said Douglas J. Matthews, president and COO of Right Management, in a press release. “Employees are clearly expressing their pent-up frustration with how they have been treated through the downturn. While employers may have taken the necessary steps to streamline operations to remain viable, it appears many employees may have felt neglected in the process. The result is a disengaged and disgruntled workforce.”
So, one survey says that four out of five employees are extremely satisfied with their current job and don’t plan to leave (APCO), while another indicates that nearly two-thirds of workers are unhappy with their employment and intend to bolt whenever they can (Right Management).
Which is it? Can both of these surveys be right?
Here’s my take: You need to take any and all surveys with a grain of salt. Yes, it really is caveat emptor when it comes to these things, and no matter what the respondents may say, I don’t think anyone, anywhere can really handicap when our turbulent economy might improve, or what America’s workforce will actually do when it does.
I’ve learned a lot of hard lessons in my many years as a boss and manager, and here’s one of them: You’ll never go wrong betting on the certainty of top executives to show off their hubris, arrogance and ego at exactly the worst possible time.
It takes a lot of confidence—some have less charitable terms for it—to be a big-time executive, and in all too many cases, that confidence/arrogance can run amok.
So it is with Goldman Sachs chairman Lloyd Blankfein. According to The New York Times, “A little more than a week after Goldman’s chairman and chief executive drew fire for saying the Wall Street giant was ‘doing God’s work,’ the bank said Tuesday that it would spend $500 million—or about 3 percent of the $16.7 billion it has so far set aside to pay its employees this year—to help thousands of small businesses recover from the recession.”
Wall Street banks “doing God’s work?” You can say a lot about the business practices on Wall Street, and a lot has been said over this past year. However, no one in their right mind ever considered it “doing God’s work”—except an over-the-top arrogant bank executive, of course.
But as the Times story also noted, “Lloyd Blankfein also showed a bit of humility, acknowledging at a conference in New York that Goldman had made mistakes, and that it was sorry. ‘We participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret,’ he said. ‘We apologize.’ ”
OK, my dad always used to tell me that confession was good for the soul, and an apology is simply a public confession. That’s usually a good thing, especially in a business setting, and in fact, there can be solid business reasons for being contrite and apologetic, as we pointed out in this classic Workforce Management article on “The Art of the Apology.”
But the head of Goldman Sachs apologizing for some of the practices that have made Wall Street the target of so much anger from average Americans? That’s a big story, but only if the apology was truly sincere, contrite and represented a clear and honest change in past practice.
As Atlanta-based attorney and consultant Stephen Paskoff said in our “Art of the Apology” classic, “Apologies can be a powerful tool for conflict resolution, but only if they’re part of a cultural change. You need your corporate leaders to say, ‘If we make mistakes, we fix them. If someone says there’s a problem, you need to listen to what they have to say. And if you have a problem, you need to bring it up, because we’ll listen.”
And that’s where I have a hard time swallowing an apology from the head of Goldman Sachs. It doesn’t sound sincere, and more to the point, I don’t see Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein touting any cultural changes at his bank that are flowing out of the transgressions he now feels compelled to apologize for.
“Blankfein’s apology might ring truer,” Gilbert wrote, “if he hadn’t been named CEO of the year by the magazine whose conference he was gracing with his presence. The fawning adoration for the multimillionaires who run the banking industry has only been diminished, not destroyed, by the damage their actions wrought. … Goldman and its peers need to practice humility and contriteness for an extended period, rather than seeking image-buffing headlines with token gestures.”
I don’t know if I could have put it any better, because Blankfein’s apology flunks the basic sniff test when it comes to public apologies: If it doesn’t sound humble, genuine and heartfelt, it probably is just a PR device to momentarily divert attention away from something else—like $16.7 billion in employee bonuses for an industry that had to be bailed out by the American taxpayer.
Believe it or not, I get asked this question a lot, and it is akin to asking about the occupant of Grant’s tomb: Where can I go to find great advice about managing a workforce?
This question usually gives me a headache, and once I get done pointing out this blog and my monthly “Last Word” column that appears both at workforce.com and in Workforce Management magazine, I have to stop and think for a bit. And then it hits me—what about the Corner Office column in the Sunday New York Times?
And there is this advice that is so glib and shoot-from-the-hip cool that it sounds good on first glance, but really, is just simplistic and silly when you examine it closely. Here’s what I’m talking about, from last Sunday’s New York Times: Mindy Crossman, CEO of HSN, claiming that her hiring philosophy is that “you only hire Tiggers. You don’t hire Eeyores.”
OK, I get the notion of not hiring someone like Eeyore, who is “generally characterized as a pessimistic, melancholic, depressed old grey stuffed donkey who is a friend of … Winnie the Pooh.”
I had a guy who used to work for me who had an Eeyore-like demeanor, and he was terribly depressing to hang around for more than about five minutes. But if hiring an Eeyore is a bad thing, why is hiring someone like Tigger (another friend of Winnie the Pooh) viewed as the better way to go?
Here’s what Mindy Crossman told the Times: [I don’t need people who] “have to be loud, but I need energy-givers and I have to get a feeling that this person is going to be able to inspire people. Are they going to be optimistic about where they’re going? Are they going to attract people who are like that?”
She’s right that high-energy people can be a great addition to a workplace, but who said that only high-energy, Tigger-like personalities inspire people? Plus, most workplaces are made up of a lot of different types of personalities.
People with a lot of energy are great in some ways for some things, but an office full of them? Somehow, I don’t think a place where everyone is bouncing off the walls makes for the best workplace environment.
And here’s one more thing: What kind of CEO speaks of their workplace and hiring philosophy in terms of fictional cartoon characters? I mean, I enjoy a good cartoon as much as anyone, but I wouldn’t describe my hiring or business philosophy in terms of Montgomery Burns, George Jetson or any other such character.
Maybe HSN’s Cindy Crossman wasn’t completely clear when she talked to The New York Times, but maybe that’s just the nature of the newspaper’s Corner Office column, because it seems to me that all too often the advice from these captains of industry is completely wrongheaded and seems to be what you should AVOID doing at all cost.
So it seems with Mindy Crossman, because her admonition that “you only hire Tiggers” is as foolish as it is shortsighted. Yes, it doesn’t pay to hire glum Eeyore types, but then again, bigger-than-life people who constantly overhype their worth and are bouncing off walls like kindergartners on a sugar high isn’t the workplace answer either.
Eeyore or Tigger? That’s a terrible choice to make, and thankfully, most CEOs know that hiring and business decisions aren’t as simple or clear-cut as that. If you look to cartoons for your hiring philosophy, well, be prepared to feel like Wyle E. Coyote chasing the Roadrunner, because it’s likely you’ll be running into a lot of walls along the way.
In this overly litigious day and age, there aren’t many workplace acts left that are so over the line that they qualify as drop-dead, you’re-fired-on-the-spot, no-additional-proof-needed offenses.
In fact, there’s only one that readily comes to mind as I think back over a long career of managing far too many people who seemed hellbent on doing something stupid that would get them canned. You know what I’m talking about—it’s taking a punch at someone while on the job.
Generally speaking, people who get physical with other people in the workplace lose their job, and usually pretty quickly. And, that’s what is probably going to happen at The Washington Post, where a longtime editor recently blew his cool over a story and came to blows with a reporter who called him something incredibly vulgar that I can’t repeat here.
According to Washingtonian.com, “Details are sketchy, but numerous witnesses report that veteran [Washington Post] feature editor Henry Allen punched out feature writer Manuel Roig-Franzia on Friday. The fracas took place in sight of Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli’s office. Brauchli rushed to separate the two. It should be noted that Allen is nearly 70, but he served in the Marines in Vietnam. He also won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for criticism. Both apparently came into play when Allen jumped Roig-Franzia.”
Gentle readers will need to read the Washingtonian version (or this report from the Washington City Paper) to get the full flavor of what was said and the circumstances that led up to the comment and fistfight, but it’s safe to say that the altercation is a reflection of the pressures people are feeling in their jobs during these uncertain times.
“Hooray that there is still enough passion left somewhere in a newsroom in America for violence to break out between colorful characters in disagreement over the quality of a story. … Newsrooms used to be places filled with interesting eccentrics driven by unreasonable passions—a situation thought of as ‘creative tension’ and often encouraged by management in eras when profits were high and arrogance was seen not as a flaw but a perquisite of being smart and right. Sadly, over the years newsrooms have come to resemble insurance offices peopled by the blanched and the pinched and the beetle-browed; lately, with layoffs thought to be on the horizon, everyone also behaves extra nicely to please the boss.”
I’m old enough to remember the era that Weingarten writes about. I experienced it as a very junior editor at the old Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, a long-dead Hearst newspaper that was well-known for such eccentric and passionate newsroom behavior.
I saw fistfights in the newsroom and at the watering hole we called a bar that was just across the street, people falling-down drunk on the copy desk, and all sorts of other behavior that was casually ignored back then but that would get you quickly canned now.
It was colorful, it was fun, but mostly, it was all fueled by the intense passion people had for their work. This is what Gene Weingarten remembers, and it is an era that, for better or for worse, is long gone.
Today, passion in the workplace is defined as work that you find incredibly meaningful or challenging (known now as employee engagement), and managers are all for more of that, but they tend to draw the line at having so much passion for the job that it pushes you to punch someone in the nose.
Back in the days that Weingarten and I remember, passionately defending your work was viewed as a good thing, not something that you worried about losing your job over. Managers back then were more concerned about channeling that passion back into improving the work, and HR was only consulted when the situation got so out of hand that the line manager couldn’t control it anymore.
So, there’s almost something retro to reading about fisticuffs taking place in a major American business over part of the job that people are passionate about. Unfortunately, passion like this gets you fired today, and HR is involved at the first hint of trouble and to make sure all the legal bases are covered so no one, least of all the company, gets sued.
So it goes in the American workplace, circa 2009. You be the judge of whether that’s good or bad.
Dealing with bullies in the workplace is one of those management topics that never seems to grow old, mainly because bullying behavior is probably as old as the workplace itself.
According to the AP, “Moira Cameron—a veteran of long military service—was named a warder at the Tower two years ago. Hers was supposed to be a happy story about how a bastion of male supremacy could become a place where women, too, could serve queen and country. [But] on Monday, embarrassed Tower officials conceded that Cameron had apparently been subjected to a campaign of bullying and harassment conducted by some of her resentful male colleagues. They said two male warders have been suspended and a third is under investigation for suspected harassment of Cameron.”
What constitutes bullying in the ranks of the British Beefeaters? Britain’s Sun newspaper reported that “Cameron’s uniform had been defaced and … nasty notes had been left in her locker.” In addition, the newspaper said that Cameron’s entry in the online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia had been defaced as part of the campaign against her.
I’m sure that it was tough being the first woman to join an all-male group like the Beefeaters, but Moira Cameron seemed to be a great choice to break the gender barrier given that she had served in the British military for more than 20 years, with stints in both Cyprus and Northern Ireland, and, because she doesn’t seem willing to take too much crap from anyone.
“I’ve had some comments,” she said early in her tenure as a Beefeater. “ I had one chap at the gate one day who said he was completely and utterly against me doing the job … I said to him, ‘I would like to thank you for dismissing my 22 years’ service in her majesty’s armed forces.’ ”
It will be interesting to see how the British deal with this incident—who handles HR issues for the Beefeaters, anyhow?—especially since the decision to bring women into what had long been an all-male bastion like the Beefeaters must have been made at a very high level by people who knew the potential for something like this to happen.
Dealing with bullies is always tricky, as we noted here at Workforce.com in this article on “Tips for HR: Dealing With Workplace Bullies,” mainly because “the HR professional must be able to distinguish a bully from an earnest but perhaps difficult or even troubled supervisor.”
It’s hard to imagine anyone being earnest about the abuse being directed toward Beefeater Moira Cameron, but I suppose that’s possible. What is clear, however, is that every manager must be prepped and ready to handle bullies in the workplace because it is a problem that is never, ever really going away.
Bullying, unfortunately, seems to be one of those quirks of human nature that you can’t stamp out. And no matter how much you do to solve the problem in your own workplace, I guarantee that it will pop up again when you least expect it—even at the Tower of London.
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