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.
Hey, Management Guy! My company has been doing big layoffs. This has been a huge trauma for everyone because the company is known for coddling and indulging its workforce, and layoffs were never, ever something you had to worry about. Well, now it’s time for the cuts to hit my staff, and frankly, I’m just not into having to be the bearer of bad news, especially since some of those getting let go are senior members of my staff. Can I avoid this bad scene altogether, perhaps by just conveniently going on vacation when the dirty deed is done?
If you get paid the big bucks to be a manager, you gotta be able to handle both good and bad. That means having the huevos grandes to let people on your staff go, if and when it ever comes to that.
“Vanity Fair … took some of the deepest staff cuts at Condé Nast, but Editor Graydon Carter didn’t deliver the bad news himself,” the Post reported. “Although Carter was said to have been at his restaurant, The Monkey Bar (Note from The Management Guy: How can some schlub editor afford to own a restaurant?), Wednesday night, he was a no-show in the office yesterday because he had jetted off on a vacation.”
The Post also added this little tidbit: “Vanity Fair’s layoffs were said to be in the double-digit range, and hit as high as senior editors and as low as fact checkers, and were deep, in part, because Carter largely ignored the edict to chop 5 percent late last year.”
So, Graydon Carter first ignores a corporate edict to cut costs, then runs out on vacation when his staff is getting whacked? Here’s a piece of advice for Condé Nast senior execs from The Management Guy: You would do well to let Mr. Carter permanently retire to managing his Monkey Bar when he returns from vacation, because he’s completely worthless as a manager, especially one you can count on when things get rough.
And that, Don, is what you should always remember: If you can’t handle the tough work of being a manager—like layoffs and staff cuts—you have no business being a manager at all. Yes, you may work in management or flatter yourself with a management title, but if you can’t look your co-workers in the eye and do the dirty deed when it needs to be done, you’re just a manager wanna-be. And in these tough economic times, those are the very first people who should be shown the door.
Close readers of this blog know that I have a low threshold for “news” or “trends” that seem to be generated by the clueless and brain-dead practitioners of America’s public relations profession solely to promote the latest book or expertise of some windbag “expert” they have as a client.
They are not a problem for 99 percent of the working world and simply are a case of creating a bogus workplace issue that—surprise!—there just happens to be some expert who can help solve.
This would all be laughable if it weren’t for the fact that there are equally brain-dead media types, primarily engaged in the broadcasting profession, who play into this hype and regurgitate the nonsense that these PR handlers and their “experts” are spewing. They help to perpetuate this cycle that focuses on silliness rather than really honest-to-goodness workplace issues.
And that gets me to my latest rant about something called National Boss Day. It’s apparently coming up Friday, October 16, although as Wikipedia rightly says (and readers note, I’ll probably never put that in a sentence again), “The holiday has been the source of some controversy and criticism in the United States, where it is often mocked as a Hallmark Holiday.”
I’ve had a couple of press releases today touting either workplace surveys pegged to National Boss Day or some manner of workplace expertise about how to deal with a boss that spins off the event.
Here’s my take: National Boss Day is a put-on, a fraud, a silly and senseless “event” that one would expect to find in a Monty Python sketch, an episode of The Office or a Dilbert cartoon. And in all cases, the mention of such an event should simply be to mock the pretentiousness of such BS.
Why do we need National Boss Day anyway? As a longtime boss, the last thing I want is for anyone working for me to engage in such nonsense because it seems to elevate being a boss for no other reason than because a boss has power and authority.
In my world, great bosses are honored for the good they do and the respect and loyalty they generate among those who work with them, not because someone concocted some fake day that people are expected to remember.
So, just remember this when you read or hear some dumb “news” story on Friday about National Boss Day. When you do, smile for a second and perhaps take a moment to wonder, “What kind of real news am I missing because some idiot editor fell prey to this PR crap about National Boss Day?”
When that happens, think of me and remember, I warned you here first.
A long time ago, in a workplace, far, far away, I worked for a guy who was fixated on the latest management trends. He wanted to be seen as cool, hip and cutting edge even if the organizational changes he was pushing didn’t always make much sense.
This was a guy who always came up with nonsensical new job titles and pretentious buzzwords for workforce practices, stuff that you see all too often in today’s workplace. I give him credit for being ahead of the times with that kind of nonsense, but there was something else he was ahead of the curve with too—making current employees reapply for their jobs.
Back in the early 1990s, he pushed a reorganization of the newspaper newsroom where I worked—a “newsroom without walls,” he called it—that basically meant eliminating all the reporting beats and most of the newsroom jobs. Instead, he came up with a new list of beats and jobs and forced everyone to reapply for their job even if it was a job that wasn’t changing.
There was certainly some logic to eliminating some positions and creating new ones, but the process of making everyone reapply sent the anxiety level among all of those having to reapply (basically, the entire newsroom staff) off the charts. It caused a huge amount of worry, grief and lost sleep among many who weren’t sure what this process of reapplying for work REALLY meant. I can’t recall anyone actually losing their job in the process, but it was not a good way to run a railroad, so to speak. It unduly tortured a lot of good people who didn’t deserve someone on high to be cavalierly fiddling with their life and livelihood.
I was thinking about this all again today when I ran across a story in The New York Times that described how a similar process was going on at a newspaper called The Journal News in Westchester County, New York. According to the Times story, “The suburban newspaper is at the vanguard of the industry: reporters at The Journal News don’t work in a newsroom, they are part of an ‘Information Center’; they don’t cover beats, they cover ‘topics’; and in a new wrinkle to an old story, the staff was not being laid off, but becoming part of a ‘comprehensive restructuring plan.’ Specifically, the 288 news and advertising employees at The Journal News were told that jobs were being redefined and that they all would need to reapply for the new positions and that by the time the re-org music stopped, 70 of them would be without jobs. What fresh hell is this?”
The Journal News is a Gannett newspaper (Gannett is the largest newspaper publisher in the country), and in the name of full disclosure, I should tell you that I worked for Gannett newspapers in Montana and Hawaii for five years in the ’90s. Gannett is known for its tough (some might say heavy-handed) way of dealing with employees, but making workers go through this surpasses anything I ever saw happen during my time working for the company.
I think the New York Times story really captured the essence of how surreal this must have been for the workers involved.
“For the last three weeks, employees at The Journal News have lived in a netherworld in which they were asked to justify their existence in a changing, shrinking world,” the Times story said. “After filling out an application on … a corporate Web site, that asked them about their new-media skills, among other things, and then being interviewed by corporate human resources executives pulled in by Gannett, they were called up to the third floor of the offices in Westchester last Thursday and given an offer letter in a thin white envelope—‘Thank you for your participation in the restructuring of the Information Center department at The Journal News. I am pleased to extend you an offer. … ’—or a much thicker manila envelope explaining their departure and severance.”
The story has to be read to be believed, but it makes me wonder: Who in their right mind chooses to torture their workforce this way? Layoffs are bad enough, but to put people through this process where they have to pitch themselves for a job they have been doing—a job that someone upstairs has probably already made a decision about anyway—qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment.
Making workers reapply for their jobs? It’s unimaginatively bad in this environment, but unfortunately, merely a sign of times and more evidence that as bad as things have been for workers, we may still not have hit bottom just yet.
= Member Only
