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.
Hey, Management Guy! Given how tough the economy is these days, there’s lots of built-up tension in the workplace. Lots of tension frequently fuels lots of emotion, and sometimes it makes you want to just pound someone. That makes me wonder: Is there ever a circumstance where it is appropriate to take a punch at a co-worker?
This just goes to prove what the Management Guy has always said: Violence has no place in the workplace, and getting physical with a boss or co-worker is usually a surefire way to get fired in any universe.
That’s why it will be interesting to watch what happens with the National Football League’s Oakland Raiders, because just this week, there are reports that two coaches got into an altercation that ended up with one coach punching out the other.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “If you asked some other folks with knowledge of the incident, they’d tell you that it was [head coach Tom] Cable who clocked defensive assistant Randy Hanson earlier this month, a punch that sent him to the hospital.”
No one in Oakland is talking much about this incident—head coach Cable simply says, “It’s an internal issue that we are dealing with, and that’s all I’m going to say”—but the last time I checked, having one coach punch out another doesn’t make for a winning workplace culture, even in the NFL. In fact, the Chronicle points out that “any assault or battery by an NFL employee, including a head coach, could be deemed a violation of the league’s personal conduct policy and result in a fine and/or suspension.”
Yes, the NFL is a tough, violent place, and yes, the Oakland Raiders have a strange way of doing things, but having coaches resort to fisticuffs to settle their differences? That’s probably too much even for the Raiders.
It’s possible that no one will get fired over this incident, but that just speaks to the peculiar nature of the Raiders in particular and professional sports in general, because in most workplaces, putting your hands on another worker usually guarantees you a quick trip to the unemployment office, as the former CEO of Home Box Office found out.
So take it from the Management Guy, who knows a thing or two about these matters: Thumping the boss or jerk co-worker may be a workforce fantasy for many, but like most fantasies, it is one best left unfulfilled.
Hey, Management Guy! I know people really value honest, straight-shooting executives, but how honest is too honest? For example, does it ever make sense for the Big Boss to diss or put downhis or her workforce? This seems like a really counterproductive and shortsighted management strategy to me.
— Sam in San Jose, CA.
Sam:
A couple of years ago, The Management Guy would have told you that it is over-the-top stupid for ANY senior manager to openly diss or talk trash about the company’s workers. Not only does this violate Hall Of Fame football coach Vince Lombardi’s old maxim that a leader should always “praise in public, criticize in private” (a philosophy The Management Guy has tried, with modest success, to emulate), but it also makes the manager in question look like a churlish philistine.
Never mind that this behavior defies all logic or business sense. Guys like Zell do it because, well, the “devil made them do it.” Yes, the same comments would probably get any other employee fired, but sometimes, top executives get to be top executives despite the fact that they are missing a basic impulse-control gene. They succeed in spite of themselves, and that’s why they sometimes end up treating and talking about workers like they are the conquered chattel of Attila the Hun.
Just this week, Bartz appeared at an investment conference in New York where she was questioned about how quickly the changes she was making at Yahoo would begin to pay dividends. That’s a pretty standard question, of course, and Bartz had a pretty standard answer, according to the Associated Press.
“While pointing to some progress,” the AP reported, “Bartz said it probably will take another year or two before Yahoo reaps the gains from her shake-up.”
Most CEOs would have left it at that, but Bartz, for better or worse, isn’t like most CEOs. She couldn’t resist the urge to follow up her straightforward assessment of Yahoo’s progress under her leadership with a gratuitous and unnecessary swipe at her workforce that would make Sam Zell proud. “For everything you can do in three steps,” Bartz added, “it will take Yahoo 22 steps [to get it done].”
You would be right to point out that it is foolish, shortsighted, and does nothing at all, but then again, you aren’t a big-time CEO like Sam Zell or Carol Bartz.
Now, Carol Bartz is not Sam Zell, but she does have a lot of the same qualities, including a wonderfully colorful vocabulary. It remains to be seen whether trash-talking her workforce in public will help in her revival of Yahoo, but The Management Guy remains unconvinced.
He’d rather put his faith in Vince Lombardi’s Super Bowl-winning advice than in the approach of Zell or Bartz, but then again, Lombardi was also known to swear like a trooper, too. The difference is, he never publicly dissed his workforce. Like all good coaches, he knew you don’t get very far by trash-talking the very players you count on for your ultimate success.
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.
This is the second installment of a new feature here at the Business of Management blog: Hey Management Guy! If you have a question about a workforce management practice (stupid or otherwise), just post it at the bottom of this blog item or e-mail it to me at jhollon@workforce.com. I’ll pick out the best queries and answer them here each month.
Hey, Management Guy! I just heard that Microsoft accidentally overpaid severance to some workers they laid off last month. Do they really need to pay it back? It seems like a cruel and heartless thing for the company to do to people who just lost their jobs, but in this economy, I guess anything is possible. What do you think?
—Seth from Sioux City, Iowa
Seth:
Take it from The Management Guy: Payback is a bitch.
I discovered this during the late-90s Internet boom when I was working as a vice president at a well-known (but now deceased) San Francisco dot-com.
Somehow, not only was my paycheck being direct-deposited in my bank account, but so was the paycheck of an administrative assistant. This went on for a couple of months until the company controller brought to my attention and—nicely—demanded the money back.
What to do? For me, the answer was simple: I quickly wrote that check because: a) I liked my job, and b) I wanted to keep it. People asked me how I could possibly not know I was getting overpaid, but it was complicated.
I was new on the job, living in San Francisco and working seven-day-a-week dot-com hours, while my wife, family and bank account were all back home in Southern California. I wasn’t terribly focused on anything other than my new job, and my wife had her hands full as well.
The bigger mystery was how the administrative assistant didn’t notice the problem, but she was a bit spacey about everything. The paycheck fiasco raised legitimate questions about her job skills and attention to detail that led (thankfully) to her departure a short time later.
The Microsoft situation is very different. The software giant overpaid the amount of severance it gave “to some of the 1,400 employees it laid off last month, stating that because of an administrative error it had paid them too much severance and now wanted the money returned,” according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
People who get overpaid by mistake, for whatever reason, are generally required to give back the money—they aren’t entitled to it. But in this case, there was another dynamic involved: These people had just been laid off, in a terrible economy, and this mega-bucks company is now coming after them for money.
Should the workers have known they were overpaid? Probably. But remember, they had just lost their livelihood and faced the prospect of having to find a new job in the midst of the worst employment market in more than 30 years. It’s entirely possible that they were just a little bit distracted.
When all of this became public over the weekend, and the media started asking questions about whether Big, Bad Microsoft was right to demand money out of people they just threw out of work, Microsoft did what any smart company would do: It abandoned the cash hunt and became magnanimous.
According to the Seattle Times, “Human-resources chief Lisa Brummel called each of the 25—part of the 1,400 people notified Jan. 22 in the company’s first widespread job cuts—to personally explain the ‘clerical error’ that caused the overpayment, and inform them they could keep the extra dough.”
And as the Post-Intelligencer noted, “at an average of $4,000 to $5,000 for each of the 25 overpaid workers—roughly $100,000 to $125,000 total—this was a public-relations blunder that Microsoft cleaned up on the cheap, at least relative to its $20.7 billion bank balance.”
Did Microsoft do the right thing here? Of course. Would the company have done it voluntarily without the glaring spotlight of media attention? That’s hard to say. But I agree wholeheartedly with the unnamed Microsoft spokesperson who told the Seattle newspapers: “This was a mistake on our part. We should have handled this situation in a more thoughtful manner.”
= Member Only
