I try not to get too philosophical in this blog, but I found myself feeling that way when reading about the death this week of Irvine Robbins, one of the founders of the Baskin-Robbins chain of ice cream stores. He died in Rancho Mirage, California, at the ripe old age of 90.
The story of how he named the business he started with his brother-in-law, Burton Baskin, is uniquely American. As The New York Times recalled today in an obituary, “Although it was Mr. Robbins who opened the first store, at the intersection of Adams and Palmer Streets in Glendale, California, on December 7, 1945, and it was three years more before he and Mr. Baskin became partners, they took a carefully familial approach to deciding who would come first in the name of what eventually became a vast international enterprise. They flipped a coin.”
More important, in my book, is how the two brothers-in-law managed the company. “They worked closely on everything,” according to Robbins’ daughter, Marsha Veit. “They would come up with ideas for flavors based on what was happening at the time, like Cocoa a Go-Go, when go-go dancers were popular. They would sit in the kitchen tasting, making sure the best ingredients were used.”
Read enough of the obituaries of Irvine Robbins (such as this one in the Los Angeles Times), and you can’t help but come away with the feeling that his legacy will be about the great innovation and fun-loving spirit he brought to his work. I’m not sure Robbins ever spent a lot of time worrying about that, but it got me to thinking: Do any of us spend much time considering what we will leave behind when our days as managers or executives come to an end?
For example, I spend a lot of time here writing about memorable good, bad and crazy workforce management practices. But on a more personal level, what do I want people to remember about me as a manager?
I don’t have a glib answer for that. What I always say when people ask me about my management style is this: Ask the people I’ve worked with. In fact, I’ve done this in job interviews. I tell the interviewer to phone any company I’ve worked at and simply ask for someone who remembers working with me. I’m confident that whatever they say will be a good reflection on who I am and what I do. If that’s my legacy, it’s one I’m happy with.
So, what is your legacy as a manager? What would you like for people to say about you after you’re gone? I’d love to hear what you have to say—either as a comment at the end of this post or as an e-mail sent to me directly at jhollon@workforce.com. I’ll share the best in a future blog post.
I don’t fly on Delta or Northwest much these days, so I don’t really have any personal insight into whether the proposed merger of the two airlines makes much business sense. One thing I do know, however, is that making one strong and profitable company out of two struggling ones is near impossible if you don’t get the workforce to buy in.
And, that’s where this one may have a struggle. A story in The Detroit News headlined “Wary workers cloud Delta-Northwest merger” talks about the challenge of merging the workforces of union-dominated Northwest (with about 22,500 union employees out of 32,000 total) with primarily nonunion Delta (where 6,300 pilots and a small number of dispatchers out of 47,000 employees are represented).
“Delta’s an interesting company in that it’s been able to maintain a decidedly nonunion culture while staying on relatively good terms with its employees,” said Michael Boyd, president of the Boyd Group, an Evergreen, Colorado-based consulting firm. “Even through bankruptcy, management has succeeded in convincing employees that their best representative is themselves.”
But, The Detroit News points out, “selling that culture to Northwest’s entrenched unions won’t be easy. Even before merger talk began, the Association of Flight Attendants got enough signatures on a petition requesting a unionization vote of 12,000 Delta flight attendants. Neither Delta nor the union has speculated on the outcome of the current election.”
If they can make this merger work, the combined airline would be the largest in the world. “The new Delta,” says The Detroit News, “is expected to employ about 75,000 people after the two companies are fully integrated. [But] employees worry: Will management follow through on promises not to cut jobs or close hubs? If the companies are in such dire financial straits because of fuel prices, will they be looking to cut wages next?”
Those are all good questions, because those are all reasonable worries for workers to have. Delta has promised that no frontline workers will lose their jobs in the merger, but is that realistic given the huge and unrelenting rise in fuel prices?
I question that promise, and so does Joe Tiberi, spokesman for the union that represents 9,500 Northwest baggage handlers. “There’s no way they can combine without massive losses of jobs,” Tiberi told The Detroit News. “We’re also worried about merging our unionized workforce with Delta’s nonunionized workers. We have pensions, but they don’t. We have no guarantee Delta wouldn’t want to get rid of our union.”
It’s hard enough to make one good airline out of two struggling ones when everyone is on board. But it is damn near impossible if you have union squabbling and critical workforce issues to hurdle. The only saving grace here is that Delta’s management seems to be driving this deal, and frankly, Delta’s management seems a lot more sensitive to worker issues than Northwest’s does . That raises the odds of success, but not enough for me gamble my next trip on Delta. I’d be surprised if a lot of other frequent travelers don’t feel the same way.
Most team-building exercises, sometimes billed as corporate retreats, have always seemed to me to be a colossal waste of time. These are grin-and-bear-it off-sites that people have to put up with because someone high up on the food chain thought it was a good idea.
I have been through a lot of these, and it always seemed that they had little connection with the real work that people, and actual work teams, do on the job. In fact, many of them have so little to do with building a team environment that you have to wonder just why anyone would take time and spend good money to force people to go through such nonsense anyway.
So, as a critic of these supposed bonding experiences, I’m not surprised when one goes terribly wrong. Case in point: a story this week in The Washington Post titled “Team-Building or Torture? Court Will Decide.”
The details of this story are amazing. “No one really disputes that Chad Hudgens was waterboarded outside a Provo [Utah] office park last May 29, right before lunch, by his boss,” the Post story says. “There is also general agreement that Hudgens volunteered for the ‘team-building exercise,’ that he lay on his back with his head downhill, and that co-workers knelt on either side of him, pinning the young sales rep down while their supervisor poured water from a gallon jug over his nose and mouth.”
The Post story continues: “And it’s widely acknowledged that the supervisor, Joshua Christopherson, then told the assembled sales team, whose numbers had been lagging: ‘You saw how hard Chad fought for air right there. I want you to go back inside and fight that hard to make sales.’ What’s at issue in the lawsuit Hudgens filed against his former employers—just as in the ongoing global debate over the CIA’s waterboarding of terrorism suspects—is the question of intent.”
It’s a story that has to be read to be believed, but it gets to something that has always bothered me: Team-building exercises like these are more about getting people to follow along blindly—to engage in groupthink—than they are in really getting people to work as a team. A better approach might be what SAP does, bringing people from all around the company together to get to know one another, swap ideas and break down barriers to collaboration.
I’m not sure how anyone, at any company, anywhere, could possibly think that waterboarding is an appropriate team-building exercise, but that’s what groupthink can do for you. It pushes people to take leave of their senses and engage in behavior in a team setting that they wouldn’t stand for if left to think about it on their own. In other words, it’s not so much team building as it is team bullying—and bullying in any form has no place at work.
I try my best NOT to write about the newspaper business much in this blog. Part of the reason is because I was a newspaper editor for 20 years and just feel there are better things to write about. But it’s also because newspapers (specifically, newspaper owners and managers) are so screwed up that I could blog about them just about every day.
Those pale in comparison with this one, though: how MediaNews’ Los Angeles News Group (owned and operated by Dean Singleton) is constantly forcing many of its workers to move from office to office around Southern California, according to blogger and former L.A. MediaNews sports columnist Paul Oberjuerge.
As he puts it, “More than 100 full-time newsroom professionals have been ordered to report to a job site different than the one they were hired at. Sometimes 44 miles away. And some have been moved as many as three times in a year. All in the name of (phantom) efficiencies and all with the unstated but overt threat of do it or get out. To make this clear: Employees were hired by the Tribune or Daily Bulletin or Sun … then later told (years and years later, in some cases) their jobs now were located in another newsroom in another city, and tough luck if it causes upheaval in your life.”
If talent is as important as so many businesses say it is, well, this is not a good way to treat your people unless your real goal is something else entirely. My cynical side immediately goes there—this is just a way to wear down people you want out and get them to leave without having to pay any severance. That may be the ultimate goal, but it could also be the work of brain-dead managers who have little talent for planning or realize the consequences of their actions. Or, it could be a little bit of both.
This is a great way to demoralize a workforce, better even than Sam Zell telling some of his people that “all of you are overhead.” It is also a great candidate for next year’s Stupidus Maximus Award that I give out recognizing “the most ignorant, shortsighted and dumb workforce management practice of the year.”
I just awarded the first Stupidus Maximus Award to Circuit City “for the decision to fire 3,400 experienced salespeople, or 9 percent of its workforce, because they were making too much money, replacing them with cheaper, less-experienced personnel.”
That was pretty bad, I thought, but the MediaNews decision to jerk around workers by continually forcing them to report to work at different places in Southern California without any real concern for what that decision is doing to their lives may actually top what Circuit City did.
Can you top this one for management idiocy? Maybe so. And if that’s the case, please let me know. I’m always looking for Stupidus Maximus nominees, so feel free to make them here as a blog comment or e-mail them to me at jhollon@workforce.com.
Maybe I’m just a curmudgeon about this, but I don’t have much use for April Fools’ Day in the workplace.
Don’t get me wrong; I think a work environment with laughter and humor improves employee morale and overall productivity. My firsthand experience in managing people for more than 20 years is that they just do a better job and accomplish more in a lighthearted workplace culture than they do in an overly serious one.
The survey asked the following question: “How appropriate do you think it is to play April Fools’ Day jokes in the office?” While only 29 percent of marketing executives found such jokes to be very or somewhat appropriate, 51 percent of advertising executives thought April Fools’ Day high jinks are OK.
A similar survey by Careerbuilder.com found that 32 percent of workers say that they have been involved with April Fools’ Day pranks at work, either on the giving or receiving end. It even went so far as to list the top 10 most memorable pranks. These included:
• Sending a fake love note to a co-worker from another co-worker.
• Calling electric company and using a co-worker’s name (and personal information) and saying he was moving, so the electricity got turned off at the co-worker’s house.
• Adjusting the sprayer in the kitchen sink to squirt co-workers when they turned on the water.
• Putting a for-sale ad for a co-worker’s home in the newspaper.
Am I the only one who thinks these “pranks” are not only stupid, but could result in legal action from the unsuspecting workers on the receiving end? An open workplace that allows people to joke and have a little fun is generally a good thing, but “pranks” that are directed at specific employees or groups hold up people to unwarranted ridicule and sap morale and esprit de corps.
Megan Slabinski, executive director of the Creative Group, probably said it best: “A distasteful or mean-spirited joke can easily damage someone’s professional reputation, co-worker relationships and career prospects. … What is viewed as lighthearted fun in one environment may be frowned upon in another.”
In other words, what qualifies as April Fools’ Day “fun” depends on your definition of the word (or maybe on whether it was your house that was listed as being for sale). Since everyone views such things very differently, my advice is to avoid pranks like these at all costs. There’s little upside, and a whole lot of downside, when you engage in such workplace “fun.”
= Member Only
