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.
If you’re a leader, you know it’s a little bit like marriage: You’re a leader in good times and bad, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse.
In other words, real leaders know they can’t just choose to be leaders when things are happy and times are good. If you accept the leadership mantle, you also buy into being the leader when things go bad and times are terrible—when those you are leading probably need your leadership the most.
And, that’s why you have to wonder about the would-be leadership of NBA superstar LeBron James.
Unless you are brain dead and living under a rock, you know LeBron. He’s 24, a mega-millionaire, and one of the best basketball players in the world. He helped lead the United States to a gold medal in men’s basketball last summer at the Beijing Olympics, and this year, he led his Cleveland Cavaliers to the best regular-season record in the NBA. Plus, he’s a one-man marketing machine with multiple national campaigns built around him—a person people like and aspire to be like.
Yes, LeBron has been a great leader and role model during this past year when things were going so well, but last weekend, he hit a bump in the leadership road. His Cleveland team was eliminated from the NBA playoffs by the Orlando Magic, and although James made a superhuman effort to will his team to victory and a place in the NBA Finals, it was not to be. Cleveland would not win an NBA championship this year.
That’s where the LeBron James leadership story takes a wrong turn.
Saturday night, after James and his Cleveland Cavaliers lost to Orlando, James did something very much unlike him, and very much unlike someone who has taken on the role of team leader: He walked away, silently, refusing to talk to the media or engage in the customary handshake with the other team. He then showered and quickly left the locker room, refusing to say anything to anyone.
Diane Pucin in the Los Angeles Times put it plainly: “Hey, LeBron. You want to be a star and have puppets cavorting in your honor on television commercials? You let talk ebb and flow about how you need the bigger stage that New York might provide in another year when you are a free agent and everyone will beg for your otherworldly basketball talent and indisputable will to win? Then show up when it hurts too, when the world isn’t being operated like a, well, puppet on a string in your favor.”
LeBron James is no mere athlete; he is someone who has opted to take on a major leadership role in a major business with all that entails. To opt out and walk away from it because things go badly is the worst possible thing a leader can do, because it is in tough times and difficult circumstances when true leadership truly reveals itself.
Real leaders are leaders 24/7, in good times and in bad, when things go your way and, especially, when they don’t. Real leaders stand up and know that only when they learn to lead with dignity through the bad can they also stand up and bask in the glory of when things go good.
In other words, real leaders don’t take a night off, or skulk away because they just suffered a crushing defeat—especially if their name is LeBron James.
There are certain issues that are universal to the workplace, any workplace, no matter where you work or what you do. And one of the biggest and most difficult workplace issues is one you may be dealing with right now: taking care of the office refrigerator.
I’ve had managers, executives and HR professionals at virtually every office I’ve ever worked in, big or small, struggle to deal with how to keep this communal experience clean, safe and accessible for all. Problem is, the old adage that Mom used to drill into your head—clean up after yourself—somehow seems to be forgotten by workers in the day-to-day flow of workplace life.
Bottom line is, everyone likes to use the office refrigerator but no one wants to take responsibility for what gets left in it. And anyone who actually takes some initiative and tries to proactively deal with the issue usually finds that the old adage that “no good deed goes unpunished” is absolutely spot-on when it comes to the office fridge.
So, add this to your list of office refrigerator horror stories. When a worker at an AT&T call center in San Jose, California decided to clean the communal fridge, it led to 325 AT&T employees getting evacuated “to a parking lot that was the company’s designated evacuation site, [while] 50 firefighters and 18 emergency vehicles raced to the scene. Seven employees, who were vomiting or complaining of nausea, were treated at area hospitals,” according to a story in the San Jose Mercury News.
According to the newspaper, “the aroma of rotting food” coming from the offending refrigerator at the AT&T office was hard for others to stomach. But when an employee decided to remove the mess to a conference room and scour the fridge with a cleaning fluid similar to 409 or Lysol, that’s when the real problem began.
“The woman on fridge duty had previously undergone nasal surgery for allergies,” the newspaper said, so she didn’t smell a thing. Others in her office did, however, and another employee sprayed a different chemical cleaner into the air, assuming it would temper the scent.
“And that’s when the party started,” said Fire Capt. Barry Stallard.
It led to the San Jose Fire Department’s hazmat team being called in, the office evacuation, and 28 people “with functioning noses [who] had to be checked out by paramedics after they were overcome by fumes.”
So, is there a lesson to be learned from this office nightmare? There is, of course: Everyone in the workforce needs to take responsibility for what they leave in the office fridge, and everyone needs to deal with their mess before it turns toxic. And if someone decides to take on the unpleasant chore of cleaning out the refrigerator, pat them on the back for their teamwork and diligence.
But whatever you do, also make sure they have a properly functioning nose.
Here’s a managerial role no one really wants to get assigned to—Designated Punching Bag.
You know what I’m talking about: It’s the person on the management team that seems to be the one who always gets handed all the bad stuff, the really horrible assignments, or, is the bearer of bad news. This often means this person is also the one who is forced to take a disproportionate share of verbal abuse—from clients, vendors, the staff and sometimes even from other executives up to and including the CEO.
“For the past six months,” the Post story said, “Kashkari has been a face of the government’s financial rescue and a sponge for congressional anger over the program. Although he scrambled to get the rescue’s operations running, often sleeping in his office and working seven days a week, during hearings lawmakers questioned his competence. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, D-Maryland, once called him ‘a chump.’ ”
The Post recounts the first time Kashkari was called to testify before a congressional oversight committee and how he coped with getting raked over the coals repeatedly for four hours by the committee’s chairman, Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, D-Ohio. Kashkari’s answer was to place “an index card on the table in front of him with the words: ‘The louder he yells at me, the calmer I will be.’ ”
As the Post story indicates, it’s not always bad to be a Designated Punching Bag. Sometimes, an organization needs someone to be the lightning rod for criticism.
Organizations will frequently designate someone with good diplomatic skills to work with angry and hard-to-deal-with clients, or with prickly vendors, or with all manner of difficult people that you just can’t ignore or get rid of. This is a role that a lot of labor mediators frequently play when a union and management are squabbling over a new contract.
But sometimes, managers become involuntary punching bags for their bosses. This can be a role they eventually accept as part of their portfolio, or, it can simply deteriorate into an abusive, one-way relationship. I’ve served in both capacities, although not by choice.
In the first case, I was the editor of a moderately sized newspaper and worked for a publisher who was fairly new to her job. She was desperate for the paper to improve and frequently got frustrated with the pace of change. When that happened, she would sometimes come into my office yelling and would proceed to ball up the newspaper and then throw it at my head before stomping off.
I know this sounds bad, but the silver lining to it was that my publisher would come back about an hour after her temper tantrum and would apologize for being out of line and reacting the way she did. Although I hated her reacting the way she did, I always respected my boss for being adult enough to come back and offer up a sincere act of contrition. To this day, I admire her for the willingness to apologize and admit her mistake.
That’s one way to be a punching bag. Another way, as I found out, is to deal with a superior who is just flat-out abusive and mean. I dealt with a guy like that at another newspaper where I was called on the carpet just about every day by a glowering thug who had no discernable skills except his ability to bust a union. He was threatened by me because I was popular with the staff and, frankly, could manage rings around him.
No one deserves to be a Designated Punching Bag, and it speaks to the incivility in our modern society that people still are forced into this role. My guess is that Neel Kashkari will be happy to get away from the Treasury Department’s bailout operations and back into a position where he gets treated with a little less abuse and a bit more respect.
There’s “no question” his job was a trial, Kashkari said of his time at the Treasury Department. “But … I also learned about myself, how to bring a team together and to get the team to perform under unbelievably trying circumstance,” he said. That’s the tough part for all managers, and the trick is to do it without being mean or abusive and hopefully, without the need for a Designated Punching Bag.
Not only has the musical entertainment gone from the predictable oldies vibe of the past few years to someone a little more current (Sheryl Crow) but now SHRM has a first-day keynote speaker for the 61st annual conference who actually can speak in a relevant, contemporary way to the challenges facing human resource professionals today. Believe it or not, SHRM has landed former General Electric CEO Jack Welch.
Welch, who has been touted as the “greatest manager of the 20th century,” is pinch-hitting for former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, who has been “assigned by NBC to produce a special report from Afghanistan in late June,” according to a e-mail from O’Neill and SHRM. As much as I believe that Brokaw would have had some interesting things to say, his keynote would probably have followed the pattern of those given over the past few years by Queen Noor, Bill Cosby, Lance Armstrong, Colin Powell and Sidney Poitier: interesting in the broad sense, but completely and totally divorced from anything specific that HR faces.
I wrote this back in 2005, but I think it is as true today about Jack Welch as it was back then: “In Jack Welch’s world, HR is not only a key part of the business, but HR people in the organization need to have special qualities to help the managers throughout the organization build leaders and careers.”
Some might disagree with this assessment, because Welch also is known for creating the infamous 20-70-10 employee assessment plan (known by its critics as “rank and yank”), where the top 20 percent of GE’s workforce each year got a big raise, while the bottom 10 percent was shown the door. In fact, Welch was frequently critical of HR, as former GE human resources vice president Bill Conaty points out. But Conaty also details how the former GE chief exec was intimately involved in all manner of HR issues.
No matter how much Welch’s appearance is costing, or what he actually says, I think it is money well spent. And if SHRM is really on the ball, they’ll make sure they tout his HR insight and credentials. In fact, it might actually be something to get people to come out and attend the SHRM conference in New Orleans and perhaps slow the downward slide in attendance.
I could be wrong about this, of course. It’s entirely possible that no single speaker or performer—not Jack Welch, Sheryl Crow or even President Barack Obama—could get people to change their minds about attending SHRM in New Orleans, given the realities of the current economy. What do you think about this? I’d like to know if you are going to attend SHRM in June, or perhaps are now considering doing so, and why. Just post a comment at the end of this blog or e-mail me directly at jhollon@workforce.com. I’ll share any thoughts I get in a future blog post.
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