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.
Words are the tools we use here at Workforce Management and www.workforce.com, but sometimes, even the best tools can get used improperly, incorrectly or far too frequently.
All of us here at the Workforce Management world headquarters know that avoiding overused business clichés—the stuff that all too many brain-dead consultants and too-much-time-on-their-hands CEOs love to spout—is just one of the occupational hazards we deal with every day.
That’s why I was amused by a recent survey of the most overused business terms that was developed by Accountemps, the world’s first and largest staffing services firm specializing in accounting and finance. The survey was conducted by an independent research firm and is based on telephone interviews with 150 senior executives from the nation’s 1,000 largest companies.
The executives were asked this simple question: “What is the most annoying or overused phrase or buzzword in the workplace today?” Their responses included:
• Leverage: As in, “We intend to leverage our investment in IT infrastructure across multiple business units to drive profits.”
• Reach out: As in, “Remember to reach out to customers impacted by the change.”
• It is what it is: As in, “The server is down today, and clients are irate. It is what it is.”
• Viral: As in, “Our video has gone viral.”
• Game changer: As in, “Transitioning from products to solutions was a game changer for our company.”
• Disconnect: As in, “There is a disconnect between what the consumer wants and what the product provides.”
• Value-add: As in, “We have to evaluate the value-add of this activity before we spend more on it.”
• Circle back: As in, “I’m heading out of the office now, but I will circle back with you later.”
• Socialize: As in, “We need to socialize this concept with our key stakeholders.”
• Interface: As in, “My job requires me to interface with all levels of the organization.”
• Cutting edge: As in, “Our cutting-edge technology gives us a competitive advantage.”
This made me wonder: How would my staff here at Workforce Management answer this same question, especially since we are flooded with pitches, press releases and business news from dawn to dusk just about every day of the year? Here’s some of the stuff that drives us crazy:
• Monetize
• Incentivize, and its ghastly cousin, incent
• Nimble, and its evil twin, robust
• Solution: As in, “We have a nimble and robust editing solution that we are trying to monetize.”
• Value proposition (a big favorite of many here at Workforce Management)
So this makes me also wonder, what do you think is the silliest business jargon you hear in you day-to-day work life? Send your favorites along to me, either with a post to this blog or via e-mail at jhollon@workforce.com, and I’ll publish the “best” ones here. I have a feeling that we have only scratched the surface here, and maybe we can give Scott Adams and Dilbert a run for their money.
No, my experience hasn’t found any of that, but it has shown me that reasonable people like reasonable rules and polices that help guide them in their everyday duties. Employees want to have some structure to their jobs and some help in dealing with difficult situations, and that’s why smart and well-thought-through policies can make for a better business.
But there is another side to workforce rules and regulations: They can be used as a hammer to pound workers into submission and limit flexibility and thoughtfulness. In my world, you want to cultivate smart employees who use their brain and exercise some discretion, when appropriate, to deal with the many shades of gray that we deal with in life.
The problem is that discretion is hard to manage. Tough, inflexible rules are much easier to hold employees to, especially when such rules are put in the hands of small-minded and unbending supervisors in an organization’s management food chain.
And, that’s why what happened at Best Buy, the large “multinational retailer of technology and entertainment products” (as the company describes itself), is a lesson for executives everywhere.
According to the Denver Post, “Two employees who tried to stop a knife-wielding shoplifter at the Best Buy store … in Broomfield [Colorado] were fired for violating corporate policy. Jared Bergstreser tackled a man who allegedly stole two cell phones from the store August 1. Colin Trapp came to his aid. Both men were fired [August 16] at the request of corporate officials because they ignored company rules against following shoplifters out the door, Bergstreser said.”
According to a Wall Street Journal account of the incident, “Bergstreser said he gave chase when a man burst out of the Best Buy store … with an armload of electronics he hadn’t paid for. Bergstreser, a 20-year-old former high school football player, said he wrestled the man to the ground. Trapp, 23, said he also rushed out of the store and pinned the suspect.”
The tussle got messy when “the alleged shoplifter was able to grab a pocket knife and cut a store manager who also had run outside,” according to the Journal. “The suspect and a male accomplice then fled, jumping into a getaway car, a gray Pontiac with a female driver, local police said. No one has been arrested.”
This falls into the category of “no good deed goes unpunished,” because what many feel is heroic conduct is actually a violation of Best Buy’s corporate policy.
Spokeswoman Kelly Groehler told the Denver Post that the company has clear policies regarding shoplifters, basically that they are supposed to let them go. “Employees who work in our stores are aware, and trained, on the standard operating procedures for dealing with shoplifting or theft,” she said. “These procedures are in place first and foremost for the safety of our employees.”
Although Best Buy’s policies are apparently common in the retail world, that hasn’t stopped people in Colorado from feeling that these two Best Buy employees got a raw deal.
The Journal notes that “scores of comments, most expressing admiration, have been posted on Trapp’s Facebook page and other Web sites. ‘Punished for not being cowards,’ one commentator wrote. … Several posters pledged to boycott the chain.”
I understand the Best Buy policy on shoplifters, and I agree with the need to have such a policy, but I wonder: Did Best Buy really need to terminate the employment of two very engaged members of their workforce? Was there not another option? And is this not a case of following the rules over the cliff?
On Wednesday, the Denver Post published an editorial protesting Best Buy’s decision to fire the young men. “Shouldn’t heroism be rewarded?” the paper asked. I agree completely. There’s a way to deal with this incident and reward the heroic effort without having these guys lose their job.
Best Buy needs to inject a little common sense into this argument and not be so focused on rules and procedures that they can’t see the bigger picture. If I were the Big Boss at Best Buy, I would have my HR people give these two a formal written reprimand for violating policy, but also a bonus and public commendation for their effort—above and beyond the call of duty—to help the company.
Heroes in the workplace should be recognized and rewarded, whether they help subdue shoplifters or land the damaged airplane they’re piloting safely in the Hudson River. Common sense and good management practice should tell us that this is the right thing to do. Letting corporate rules and policies dictate otherwise is no way to run a railroad—or to build a highly engaged workforce.
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