This isn’t some subjective observation on my part, but rather, what I have learned firsthand from managing people for the better part of 30 years. But one reader of this blog thinks I’m dead wrong on this subject and makes a very articulate challenge to my point of view.
“The problem with the examples here is that they typify the worst kind of sleazy behavior by married people with a substantial power differential between themselves and the people they’re having affairs with. All the office romance bans in the world aren’t going to begin to stop that behavior—the egos are too big and the sense of power too inflated.
“What such policies will do is push normal, healthy relationships underground, so that no real discussion with the employer can take place. You may call it prattle, but it’s unrealistic to believe that people won’t have workplace romances. The best policies I’ve seen accept this and deal with it an adult fashion instead of forcing the employees to try to fly below the radar.”
Now, let me be clear: I have never, ever called for a formal ban on office romances. In fact, here’s what I said about this last year at Valentine’s Day: Office romances have always been part of the equation in any workplace since the dawn of time, and there’s no evidence that the problem has gotten appreciably better or appreciably worse. Yes, sometimes office romances go bad, but the trend The New York Times was touting back in 2007 was to not get too worried or worked up about co-workers dating.
I certainly understand that very pragmatic viewpoint, but my own opinion on office romance hasn’t changed—hype, trends and surveys notwithstanding. It’s a bad idea. That’s because, in my experience, they go bad all too often. And, spoiled office romances leave the participants—and the co-workers around them, who have to live with the bitter, sometimes litigious aftermath—much worse off as a result.
Yes, I’ve written about the fallout from high-profile office affairs like the recent one with ESPN’s Steve Phillips (who just got fired for his bad judgment) and David Letterman before him. And yes, I agree with reader HR PS that these two examples DO “typify the worst kind of sleazy behavior by married people with a substantial power differential between themselves and the people they’re having affairs with.”
As bad as those are, the ones that drove me crazy were of the more mundane variety, like the three-month relationship between two co-workers who sat next to each other. When something like that goes sour, it affects everyone around them, generally for the worse. And, it’s a management headache I’ve had all too often.
But am I wrong here, as reader HR PS says? Can pragmatic office policies realistically deal with affairs of the heart, or are they just a Band-Aid approach to an emotional and hard-to-handle workforce problem?
I love David Letterman. His late-night talk show is clearly the best of the bunch, and in my mind, he’s followed along in the footsteps of his mentor, the great late-night king, Johnny Carson.
It’s clear to me that David Letterman, highly paid late-night comedian and CBS talk show star, never heard (or conveniently forgot) one of the most basic managerial rules of all—don’t fish off the company pier.
Although many of the details are sketchy, there’s nothing that says what Letterman did was anything but consensual. One CBS Radio report I heard said Letterman was having sex with female staffers in his office, and as bad as that sounds, it’s still legal for consenting adults to engage in such behavior should they choose to do so.
That’s what catches me up, however. Why would any thinking, rational person—particularly someone of Letterman’s stature—choose to put themselves in a compromising position like that?
“While Letterman seems to be in no immediate risk of losing either his family or his job (ratings from last night’s telecast will likely be stratospheric), his troubles may not be over,” Time magazine says. “Having sex with people who were his employees or whom he managed could leave him, or CBS, open to a sexual-harassment lawsuit. It’s certain the comedian has given the network’s lawyers plenty of reasons to be up at night.”
Bosses getting involved with those who work for them is a trend that’s probably as old as the workplace itself. However, it’s fraught with peril and, in my long experience, is almost never worth the risk.
In fact, if you looked at this as a smart businessperson and examined the risk-reward potential, or the ROI of such a relationship, you probably wouldn’t get involved in such a deal at any level. But, that’s applying rational thinking to something that’s clearly an irrational decision.
Letterman has had a lot of drama and bad stuff to deal with in his life, but this is one that wasn’t foisted upon him; it’s trouble that’s self-inflicted. Even if the foiled extortion attempt turns out to be the worst of it, he’s left his many fans wondering just how someone who seems so smart and snappy on the surface can engage in such foolish (and some would say terribly bad) behavior when the office door is closed?
As someone who makes his living skewering other people and joking about their foibles, Letterman’s now going to become the punch line for a lot of manager and workplace jokes.
Who wants to be that guy? No manager that I know of. Yet Letterman, the guy who has publicly reveled in zinging Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer and many others for their sexual high jinks, is now going to become the poster boy for bosses behaving badly. That’s called karma, I believe.
And the jokes and zingers about this have already started. As Time magazine solemnly notes: “Letterman has also probably given truckloads of material to other comedians—or even his own writers. Let’s just say he may come to regret calling his company Worldwide Pants.”
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.
This may sound odd to some, but regular readers of this blog have probably figured it out already: I live, and thrive, on bad management.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate all that good-to-great leadership that people spend so much time talking about; it’s just that I find that I get a lot more insight, strategy and perspective from bad management than I do from good. I was always the guy in business school who wanted to hear more about the destructive shenanigans of guys like “Chain Saw” Al Dunlap at Sunbeam than the smart and savvy work of a visionary like Herb Kelleher at Southwest Airlines.
In short, I believe that there are great lessons in closely examining bad management. And, that’s why I follow Sam Zell so closely.
Zell is the foul-mouthed CEO of Tribune Co., the big media company that owns not only television and radio stations but also big newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun. He was in over his head from the moment he cut the deal to take control of Tribune, and his over-the-top hubris, chronic arrogance and terribly shortsighted decision-making (by both Zell and his management minions) have helped push Tribune into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Well, we may be starting to see the end of Sam Zell, at least as the guy controlling Tribune. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that “Sam Zell’s days as a media titan in Chicago are nearly over. … Eight months after [Tribune’s bankruptcy] filing, two sources familiar with the process said creditors are working on a reorganization plan that elbows Zell aside. The creditors, including investment banks owed $8.6 billion from Zell’s Tribune takeover, would stage a takeover of their own and sell off the company’s newspapers and broadcast stations as they see fit.”
A big part of Zell’s problem, of course, is that he took control of Tribune and “piled on debt at exactly the wrong time, and a collapse in advertising for traditional media forced him to take the company to Chapter 11 bankruptcy.” But, Zell’s incredible arrogance in his own leadership and managerial abilities played a big role as well.
“This was a textbook case of a leverage buyout gone bad,” said William Brandt Jr., a corporate turnaround expert not involved in the case who talked to the Sun-Times. Brandt, president of Development Specialists Inc., hit the nail squarely on the head when he said that Zell and his team “were imbeciles who had no idea what they were doing.”
And, the newspaper noted that “Tribune debt recently traded for about 7 cents on the dollar, meaning investors think a lottery ticket is just as likely to pay off. The company’s total debt, counting what Zell assumed in his takeover, is around $13 billion. Brandt said the Tribune deal has become such a ‘reputational disaster’ for Zell that he’s probably not involved much in management other than creditor negotiations.”
I’m not sure why an “imbecile” like Sam Zell, a guy who knew absolutely nothing about the media business when he took over Tribune, thought he could swoop in and be successful where more experienced media managers had failed. Maybe it’s that “Master of the Universe” mania that author Tom Wolfe chronicled so famously in The Bonfire of the Vanities that led Zell to think he was smarter and savvier than everyone else.
He wasn’t, of course, and it’s pretty clear that he’ll leave Tribune, when he finally gets out, a whole lot worse off than when he took it over. When that happens, I’ll miss Zell and his foul-mouthed ways, but it will be better for all if he’s relegated, like “Chain Saw” Al Dunlap, to a management school case study on how NOT to run a business and lead a workforce.
A famous Los Angeles Times memo to the staff once described Sam Zell as “a force of a nature,” and it was spot-on true. Unfortunately, Zell was a terribly destructive one, like an earthquake or hurricane, and those left at the company he has done so much to harm will be left to clean up the mess he created for many, many years to come.
Here’s something that doesn’t take a lot of intuition to figure out: Organizational culture is the DNA of a business. In the most successful companies it is not only tangible and specific, but it also defines the essence of the organization and provides the glue that holds the workforce together.
The success of Home Depot was based not only on having a large and competitively priced store where you could find just about anything needed to renovate, fix or remodel a home, but also in the army of orange-aproned experts that were always available to help with any problem or situation you might have.
It was this personal, customer-first service that was, at least in my mind, the key to Home Depot’s remarkable business success. And, it was one of things that former CEO Bob Nardelli seemed to have little use or respect for.
“I would say for a period of about four to five years, we lost our way through the last CEO,” Marcus told the Journal-Constitution. “[Marcus] was referring,” the newspaper pointed out, “to the December 2000-January 2007 reign of Bob Nardelli as chief executive. Recruited from General Electric, he was the first CEO brought in from outside.”
It’s not atypical for any new manager to want to make their mark, and this is especially true for a new chief executive brought in from the outside. But all too often, making their mark means a wholesale dismantling of the company culture long before they really understand or appreciate it. This “marking your turf” style of management is similar to what a dog does as they wander through a new neighborhood—and just about as useful.
“Nardelli, hired to give Home Depot discipline and structure, was criticized for changing a culture that had been working,” the newspaper story noted, and Bernie Marcus reiterated this, saying, “I think Nardelli came in because Arthur and I felt we had grown the business and the systems were very antiquated. We were very entrepreneurial and we needed some discipline. Nardelli provided that. But unfortunately, he had his own culture he tried to infuse into Home Depot, and that culture didn’t work.”
I don’t want to keep beating on Nardelli, but he’s a great case study in how a talented executive can do all the right things financially yet completely foul up an organization by failing to understand or respect the underlying culture that drives it.
And to be fair, Nardelli is just one of many talented and highly paid executives who parachute into a business to save it but fail to understand that you need the support of those on the ground to really drive meaningful, positive change. I can point to any number of other executives—and names like Tribune’s Sam Zell and former Circuit City CEO Philip Schoonover leap to mind—who are guilty of the same shortsighted judgment.
The culture of an organization is highly critical no matter what the business or endeavor. Smart executives get this, but being highly paid doesn’t mean you are smart or sensible. It just means that you managed to find some shallow-minded board of directors somewhere to throw you a lot of money before they really have a good handle on what you can actually do.
“Frank is not wedded to everything in the past,” said Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blake, “but he understands the value of culture and those fundamentals.”
Amen to that, I say. And maybe, just maybe, it gives Home Depot—and its remarkable culture—a fighting chance of survival.
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