One question kept going through my mind when I heard of President Barack Obama’s decision to abruptly demand the resignation of General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner as part of government efforts to prop up the company.
It’s this: When was the last time a CEO was unceremoniously canned as if he were just another floor worker?
In most cases, CEOs (and just about any resigning senior manager, for that matter) get to walk away on their own terms, in their own way. There is usually a carefully crafted statement, with a little PR spin about “leaving to pursue new challenges” or some other nonsense, and perhaps there is some laudatory BS from the board. And, of course, there’s a big payday in the form of a giant golden parachute.
“The first order of business,” the story reported, was whether or not to oust GM’s Wagoner. “It ‘wasn’t the hardest decision,’ ” according to one unnamed government official who spoke to the Journal.
Detroit News columnist Daniel Howes is even more pointed, asking: “What does it say that on the same day President Obama made nice at the White House with the nation’s leading bank CEOs—none of whom have lost their jobs despite sitting on vastly larger sums of taxpayer dough—the head of the president’s auto task force was urging Wagoner to ‘step aside?’”
These are all good questions, but I keep coming back to the abrupt way Wagoner was given his walking papers. It’s true that if you look at his track record, Wagoner should probably have been bounced long before now. He “has presided over the virtual wipeout of GM shareholders,” according to the Los Angeles Times, with the stock “down 95 percent since June 2000.”
Yes, there was clearly good reason for firing Wagoner, but did we need the very public walking of the plank?
Many people are appalled by how the Obama administration treated the former GM chief, but really, is this any different from the way most rank-and-file workers get shown the door? Yes, Wagoner is leaving with millions, but besides that, there’s not much difference between how he got dumped and how any other working stiff is let go.
I’m not a fan of handling layoffs and firings this way, but I certainly know why the drill goes like this. And that’s the one little hopeful sign I take away from how big-time CEO Rick Wagoner got the ax: Maybe we finally will start to see some leveling of the playing field in how executives and CEOs get treated compared with the rest of the workforce.
In my book, a lot more big-time executives should get terminated publicly when they fail—unceremoniously and with extreme prejudice. And while we’re at it, we should deflate the golden parachute payouts as well.
If that happened a little more often—as perhaps it should have when Phillip Schoonover was running Circuit City into the ground—we not only would get smarter people running organizations, but we’d also have CEOS who would act with lot more sensitivity and compassion when cutbacks are being contemplated for the rest of the workforce.
And although President Obama didn’t do it for Rick Wagoner, perhaps this public episode will make a CEO or two ponder how it might feel for them if the termination shoe were on the other foot.
When workers leave, they take things with them. And often, what they take are things that rightly belong to their company.
“Nearly 60 percent of employees who quit a job or are asked to leave are stealing company data, according to a report by the Ponemon Institute, a Tucson-based research group,” said the Post story. The survey was based on interviews with 945 adults who were laid off, fired or changed jobs in the last year.”
Sounds bad, right? Well, it gets worse. “Seventy-nine percent of those who admitted to taking data said they did so despite knowing that their former employer did not permit them to take internal company information,” the Post story added. “Sixty-five percent of those who took data from their former employer grabbed e-mail lists. The next most frequently stolen data included non-financial business information (45 percent), customer contact lists (39 percent), employee records (35 percent) and financial information (16 percent).”
It’s a longstanding worker tradition to stick it to the organization that just got rid of you by taking something you shouldn’t. Anyone who has managed for any length of time has seen it happen. It’s not surprising that it seems to be happening more now, with so many people losing their jobs, but it was an issue even back during much better times.
Larry Ponemon, founder of the Ponemon Institute, told The Washington Post that there are a number of factors that contribute to the cavalier attitude so many workers have toward data theft, including telecommuting and a lack of employee loyalty.
“What’s interesting is more and more people seem to feel entitled to information they create on the job, and an increase in mobility in the workforce means many employees don’t have a lasting relationship with their employers,” Ponemon told the newspaper. “Also, as you have more employees working from remote locations and on home computers, the concept of who really controls this data isn’t often clear to people.”
His last point—that it is not always clear who controls the data—isn’t a new issue. I know many former co-workers who walked out of a job with materials that they thought they were entitled to, and I saw it 20 years ago when people weren’t working on home computers from remote locations.
Taking something that doesn’t belong to you is never right, but when people lose their jobs and livelihoods, they don’t always act rationally. They take things with them that may help them get their next job. They view the information they take as a “benefit” to them. Even if it’s highly illegal to you.
In the pantheon of life experiences, getting fired is probably one of the very worst ones you can ever endure. It’s something you shouldn’t wish on anyone, although I can point to a few first-class assholes I’ve been very happy to see get the boot.
I’ve written about this topic a little this year, most notably when I asked the question “Is there ever a good time to fire someone?” after the New York Mets canned their field manager in the middle of the night right after playing a road game in California.
The Ad Age article is interesting because it gives you a number of tips on how to cope with being fired or, to put it another way, being the subject of an “involuntary layoff,” as it is sometimes called in politically correct HR speak. I’m talking about tips like “Don’t sweat it until it happens” and “Freak out. Grieve. Scream. Yell. Throw things. Cry. Drink. Whatever. But get it out of your system. You absolutely, positively have to deal with it now, otherwise you’ll carry it around with you for the next 30 years.”
There is some good coping advice here, but for the most part, Dihl just deals with how the person being fired should deal with the issue, not how the manager doing the dirty deed should handle it. For that, you should look at how not to do it and see the example set by Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis when he dumped his head football coach earlier this fall.
But you know what really got me thinking when I saw the story? It’s the notion that so many people are getting fired, bought out, laid off and outsourced right now that articles like “How to Be Fired” are viewed as mainstream business commentary, and not just a niche topic for an unfortunate few.
Well, I don’t believe the media has had much to do with the 440,000 jobs that have been lost this year in the U.S., the housing market woes driven by the collapse of so many subprime lenders or the rise in oil and domestic gas prices to record levels. But the media does reflect what is going on in the job market, and this story in today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution is a good look into how Americans are struggling to make the best out of a bad situation:
“ ‘It’s a Darwinian job market. You take what you can get,’ said Georgia Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond.” He added that people in Georgia are “ ‘downshifting … and taking jobs paying less money because they can’t find anything else.’ In his nine years as labor commissioner, Thurmond said he hasn’t seen a job market as rough as this one. ‘It’s tougher than post-9/11,’ he said. ‘This is much more difficult, primarily due to inflation being fueled by high gas prices.’ ”
When times get tough and things tighten up, resilient people do what they have to do. As the Journal-Constitution story points out, “Cleaning firms, book stores, security firms, big-box retailers and the like have seen a spike in job applications in recent months, some from well-educated, white-collar workers. And many workers of all educational and economic levels are doing jobs they never dreamed they’d be doing.”
The Journal-Constitution story quotes one economist, Peter Morici of the University of Maryland, who calls what we are currently going through a “middle-class recession.” So far, he said, “we have a low-grade recession. The jobs are coming out of manufacturing, construction, banking. Not cleaning services and fast food. Lower-end industries aren’t shedding jobs, yet.”
I guess that’s good news for people losing their jobs in those middle-class professions, because at some point, any job is better than no job. For all workers, I think the smart thinking in this economy continues to be pretty simple and follows what I have said before: You should hope for the best, but continue to prepare for the worst.
Last night, I watched the Los Angeles Angels-New York Mets game from Anaheim (right down the road from the Workforce Management world headquarters) and heard the Angel announcers talking about the rumors surrounding whether Mets manager Willie Randolph would keep his job, given the team’s mediocre record. The Mets won 9-6, so Randolph’s job seemed safe for another day, right?
Wrong.
Driving to work this morning, I heard the news-radio chatter about how the Mets had finally fired Randolph, after Monday’s victory, at 12:11 a.m. California time. The timing seemed especially odd since the Mets played at home Sunday and then flew 3,000 miles to California. Why would you force a guy to fly coast to coast and then fire him in the middle of the night after his team actually did something good?
The New York media is having a field day with this one. Newsday’s headline, “Mets’ handling of Willie cowardly,” seemed to say it all—and for good reason. And it brings to mind the long-standing HR question: Is there ever a good time to fire someone?
I found myself engaged in this debate a few years ago. I had to let someone go and wanted to do it on Friday, at the end of the day, so the person could leave quietly with a minimum of people around to notice. My HR people, however, told me that it was well known that Friday was the worst possible day for a termination. They suggested I do it on Monday instead, but that seemed both odd and counterintuitive to me.
So I throw the question out to all of you: When is the right time (if there is a right time) to let someone go? Is there a best day or time to do it? Or is it less about the day and time and more about how you treat the person on the other side of the table? I’d love to get your comments here (or sent to me directly at jhollon@workforce.com).
“You know what this reeks of?” Newsday sports columnist Jim Baumbach asked. “Someone made this decision days ago and agonized for hours on how to announce it to the public in the best way possible to keep the pressure off their own self. … This is not about whether this was the right move. But Randolph deserved better than how the Mets handled this, and so did the players and the fans. There is no defending the Mets management today. They screwed this up royally, and it’s hard not to think they mishandled this mess for the past week simply to find the best way to make themselves look better.”
Am I wrong about this? Are there really “best practices” and best days and times when it comes to terminations? If there are, I’d like to hear what they are.
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