Stalling Tactics

Author’s Note: In a previous blog, we found out about Harold, who saw all the promotions going on around him but wasn’t getting promoted himself. Having spoken with his HR representative and receiving a less than satisfactory response, he wondered what his next step was. Unfortunately, the HR representative wasn’t the only one who was less than forthcoming with him.

After hearing the response from HR and seeing that he would get no help on that front, Harold began to work on some other fronts to understand why he wasn’t getting promoted and what he could to change that situation. Taking the direct route, he spoke with his supervisor and her manager, plainly asking what he was doing wrong. They answered carefully and with consideration they said they were glad Harold brought this to their attention and would be speaking with him separately about it. Harold didn’t hold his breath waiting for that to happen, but he would follow up on occasion to remind them about that conversation.

It was then something interesting happened. An executive of the department asked to meet with Harold to discuss Harold wanting to advance. They sat and chatted for a while about what Harold thought were some of the gaps in the department’s servicing structure. Harold offered his thoughts, and the executive asked him to submit a proposal for a position to address that gap. Again, Harold tempered his expectations but knew he had to go along for even the hope of some progress.

He spoke with his management about the conversation, which his management had facilitated, and was asked by them to run the proposal passed their eyes before going to the senior executive. Harold crafted this new position document carefully, getting feedback, making changes, and then handed it to his senior management for their response.

The manager’s response was one of silence. Besides saying that he had discussed this with the executive, he said nothing else. Upon prompting by Harold the manager shared that the department leadership was about to undergo discussions about their servicing structure so there could be no new positions for now. Harold was disappointed but realized he needed to play the game. He continued to do his job, handled the increasing workload, and waited as patiently as possible.

A few weeks later the department shared the new servicing structure, designed to help the department cope with increased business with the same amount of people. With that done, Harold hoped his proposal would get some attention. He continued to do his job, handled the increasing workload, and waited as patiently as possible.

A week or so later Harold was informed that the company had decided to expand their investigations beyond the servicing strategy into their sales strategy. This would place a hold on any consideration of Harold’s proposal, though he was told there was still interest in it. He continued to do his job, handled the increasing workload, and waited as patiently as possible. See a pattern here?

The manager was true to his word and let Harold know there was progress on the position and told Harold a meeting would appear on his calendar very soon regarding it. Harold was grateful and waited for the meeting to appear…and waited…and waited. He sent a follow up message or so thanking the manager for the information and wondering when the meeting would be scheduled.

A week or so later a meeting appeared. Looking at the invitees, Harold saw a name he really wasn’t happy to see. It was Gloria, the HR person Harold had spoken to previously. The meeting was not to discuss the new position, but to let Harold know his position had been eliminated. While he wasn’t alone in the layoffs, as many of his colleagues were also on the receiving end of these conversations, it felt like a betrayal to Harold. To him, it felt like they were stringing him along, getting the work out of him, plying him with promises of recognition until they no longer needed his effort.

Economic times are good and they are bad. Companies hire and they lay off. Any experienced employee knows this. What stays the same, or what should stay the same, is the integrity of the people navigating these oceans. You can either be up front and forthright with your employees or you can install false hope to keep your people productive and then pull the rug out from under them.

The first way doesn’t guarantee high productivity but does treats your employees with the respect they want and deserve. The second can give you the results you want but tells your employees that they matter very little to the company. What does it matter? They’re going to be let go anyway. So what if your company gets a poor reputation online with job seekers? There will always be someone who will believe the promises of advancement and a company which cares about them.

The United States and the world recently went through a period where there weren’t enough people to hire, forcing companies to be competitive. Not wanting to throw money at the problem, many HR people spoke of ‘the company culture’ as the differentiator. Every time a company treats a Harold the way they do. Every time a Harold is strung along. Every time these type of tactics are used to get productivity, it chips away at the collective integrity of the corporate world. Excuse me, Mr. or Ms. HR person, but too many have seen your ‘culture’. We’ll take the money, thank you very much.

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It’ll Be the Death of Me

It started as an ordinary day for Bill. He arrived at his desk at work and checked his calendar. He had a seminar to present to his affiliate network later that day. He did what he usually did to drive additional attendance — he posted the seminar details on the bulletin board that was available online to the entire affiliate network. He looked at his email and began his day in earnest.

The time for the seminar came and went with no surprises. Bill presented the material, the affiliates expressed their appreciation for his time, and he logged off from the web conferencing software. It was then things got weird.

A colleague messaged Bill asking if he was okay after ‘what happened’. Bill paused for a minute. What happened? He saw no notices for meetings. There was no company-wide announcement from what he knew. He selected his colleague’s message and replied, “I’m fine, but what happened?”

It seems that someone had a rather strong reaction to the post that Bill had written about the class. It wasn’t the content of the post, but rather that the post went to one of the affiliates employees at all. Bill’s colleague wrote back to Bill, attaching a screen shot of a reply to Bill’s post. The reply stated, “Stop bothering me with these messages or I’ll run you over with my car!”

Bill paused for a bit and then smiled half a smile. It was the first time he had been threatened with death for wanting to improve people’s skills. Bill’s colleague, who was in charge of policing the bulletin board, told Bill she had erased the post, after taking a screen shot of it, and reported it to Bill’s manager as well as the colleague’s manager. Bill wasn’t terribly worried, but wanted to make sure he reported it as well just in case this was more than just an empty threat.

Bill’s manager was shocked at the death threat, and immediately reported it to both Human Resources and to the manager’s manager. For Bill’s part, he reported it to his local police, complete with any evidence he had, to ensure local law enforcement had a record of this. A few days later local law enforcement informed him that the person who threatened him was found and informed that if this person ever made threats against Bill again, he would be subject to prosecution. Bill was satisfied with the outcome, especially when he heard the affiliate had terminated the employee.

It was what didn’t happen that made Bill see his company in a new light. It was a small enough company where he knew the executives that made up the C-Suite. He knew each executive was informed of this situation. Yet not one executive bothered to contact him to offer sympathy or see if he was alright after this ordeal. Even the notification of the affiliate was handed off to a lower-level functionary of the company. For those who ran the company, it was an insignificant event that happened to an insignificant employee.

Except it wasn’t insignificant to Bill. His life had been threatened. Agreed, nobody was holding a knife to his throat. Still, nobody in the company could remember this ever happening to an employee. That didn’t matter. Bill didn’t seem to matter enough for anyone to check on his health and welfare, save for his manager. From that day forward, Bill didn’t act with the same sense of urgency or expediency regarding his work that he had previously. After all, if he wasn’t cared about, why should he care more than he needed to collect a paycheck?

If you speak HR, you will know about ‘non-monetary rewards’. That and other terms are used to describe rewarding an employee with something other than money. Studies show that these can help keep an employee engaged and productive. They cost the company little or nothing but can pay tremendous dividends. When not used, they can have a devastating effect on morale and productivity.

Bill’s executives could have taken under two minutes to message Bill asking how he was doing after the incident. The fact that they didn’t illustrated to Bill what was and wasn’t important to the C-Suite. Every time a salesperson onboarded another affiliate, celebrations were held. That was important. Bill wasn’t. He was insignificant. And in that instant, so was the company, at least to Bill.

Preach and Practice

The message was clear during all the seminars the company was broadcasting to its franchisees. If they wanted to keep their employees during and after the current recessionary times, they needed to make them feel needed, wanted, and special. Many of the franchisees understood the message and shared that they were doing just that. They were engaging in one-on-one conversations with their employees, writing notes of appreciation, and doing what they could to keep the spirits up of the employees, either in person or remotely.

What’s more than that, it seemed to be working well. The leadership of the company received positive reviews for both the seminars and the message that was being broadcast. The franchisees were not losing their employees to the competition even when their commissions were lower due to lower sales.

There was only one group who wasn’t practicing these techniques. The leadership of the company itself. Yes, they were regularly sending out an email or having a team web conference and saying how proud they were of the corporate employees, who were working extra hours at reduced pay to keep all these seminar and other events going. However, as for any of the other techniques the company was advocating its franchisee base do, the actions of the company’s leadership was lacking.

Not one employee could say that the leadership had singled them out for an individual email, phone call or personal note expressing their gratitude for the crippling workload, or managing a household budget with a reduced salary, or for getting all their work done when their hours had been reduced. True, their local managers, mostly, thanked them for their hard work and said they appreciated their extra work. Some of the local management had even said for the employee to take a day off and not declare it as a thank you for the extra time put in. But the senior leadership? Except for the obligatory ‘thank you’ at a company meeting, nothing more seemed to come from their collective creativity to make the employees feel wanted, needed, or appreciated.

As the weeks of onerous hours and little pay wore on, so did nerves, and they were fraying fast. That seemed to be little noticed by leadership, which was always asking for more, expecting more, and even criticizing more when mistakes happened.

A simple fact of life that seems to escape many leaders is that it takes a happy staff to make happy customers. How do you make staff happy? Besides money, most want to be appreciated in some meaningful way. That is not a passing, “Thank you so much” in a company meeting. It is something done for the employees on a personal level. It is a recognition that the employee has sacrificed part of their lives to make the customer happy. A good leader will understand that and take the time to reach out to the employee to make sure that appreciation is expressed in a why the employee will find special.

The gap between words and action is amplified when you are giving one message to others and then not putting actions to that message yourself. Your message becomes disingenuous when you are not following it yourself. That leads to your employees wondering why they should continue their Herculean efforts when their leaders can’t be bothered to recognize that effort beyond a few measly words said to everyone.

Simply put, when you don’t make an effort to value your employees, what is there to entice your employees to value you or your business?

Make the effort, put in the time, and make the recognition personal. When you do, you’ll see all the words you are throwing at others can actually work for you, too.

What? You Want Us to Give?

It had been a rough month and a half for the company. The recession had already caused the company to cut salaries, furlough employees, and cut benefits. Employees were working long hours to both make up for the work of their furloughed colleagues and to help preserve the company. As the work went into the second month of this, nerves were frayed, tempers short, and personal budgets strained.

The CEO had made it a practice to update the company each week on the status of the business, if there would be any further or extended salary cuts, and when there was going to be some relief. At the end of his remarks, he would take questions typed in by the employees viewing his live address. Over the course of the updates, he had made the following statements in response to questions asked.

• The money lost from salary cuts would not be returned to employees once business was back to normal
• Bonuses, which the company used to augment their less-than-fair-market-value salaries, would be very small, and employees better prepare for that
• There would be no monetary compensation of any kind to thank employees for their herculean struggles

The employee questions were persistent, though. In this particular week, it was suggested that employees get an extra one day or two days off as a bonus for the hours they have put in and the sacrifices they have been forced to make. The CEO pondered that for a few seconds, and then turned the question over to his HR Director, who was also on the call.

The HR Director took a few seconds to reflect upon the question and answered as follows. “I would encourage employees to take the time off they already have”. That was the end of the statement.

The employees couldn’t believe what they heard. First, they were being told that no, they would not be receiving any type of appreciation for the company for the extraordinary work they were doing, for less money and fewer benefits. Second, they were being scolded for not taking off any time in a period where they were working 12-16 hours days just to stay even with their work. There were a chorus of people saying they would be finding a new place to work once this recession ended. Most had fewer reasons to give all they had to keep a business afloat when that same business seemed to care nothing of them.

In order to get through difficult times, leadership needs to have a give-and-take relationship with the employees. The leadership takes from employees during the deepest part of the crisis, but also needs to give something back to the employees to keep them motivated and productive. Saying how proud you are of your employees or giving them a virtual pat on the back is good, but not enough.

By continuously taking and giving nothing, you risk burning out your employees and engendering enough ill will to affect your business even when the good times come back. You risk losing incredible amounts of knowledge, the relationships your employees have created with your customers, and enough social media criticism of your company to make potential candidates think twice about working there.

Good leadership knows practicing all take and no give causes losses all around. They make sure that whatever they can give during the bad times will result in increased retention, happier employees, and a company which will survive good times and bad. Give that extra day off. Even if they can’t take it due to their workload, they will remember what the company did for them when they have the opportunity to go somewhere else.

I Have 99 Non-Problems…

It was a very simple issue. Sarah did not like Jane. She, Sarah, would not admit this, but it was evident to everyone in the department. Sarah did not like Jane. According to Sarah, Jane was not a good worker and, despite all that Sarah had done to ‘remedy’ the problem, nothing worked.

As time went on, Sarah received a promotion, partially based on Jane’s work. Jane no longer reported to Sarah directly, but to Tim, who reported to Sarah.

Under Tim, Jane blossomed. Tim encountered some issues with Jane, which they worked together to solve. He saw the Jane that her previous managers, except for Sarah, saw in her. Eventually he was able to expand her skill set with new duties that grew her professionally.

This, however, was not good enough for Sarah. She would not let go of her original opinion of Jane, despite the evidence to the contrary. She would seize on any mistake that Jane made, no matter how minor, as evidence that she was right all along. When one of Jane’s triumphs was pointed out to Sarah, she would dismiss it with a cursory acknowledgement and move on to another topic of conversation.

Sarah grew increasingly frustrated with Tim. Why couldn’t he see how bad Jane was! There was only one reason that Sarah could think of. Tim must be a poor manager. With the same resolve she demonstrated towards Jane, Sarah now went after Tim. Nothing he did was good enough. His reviews took a decided downturn. He was ‘called in’ for discussions with Sarah and then with Sarah and the Employee Relations representative.

As Tim saw he had one foot on the banana peel, he decided he had little to lose. He had candid conversations with Sarah and the Employee Relations representative, saying that this was all about Jane and his refusal to grant Sarah’s wish of firing her. He stated all the good things that Jane had done while under his supervision, and stating that Jane could do 99 good things and Sarah would point out the one thing that Jane did wrong.

Sarah’s response? “Now you just sound like Jane!” No denial. No argument. It was simply Tim’s poor management skills that caused this, not her unreasonable expectations. It didn’t matter that the rest of Sarah’s employees were also struggling under the burden of work she was assigning. It was simply their fault for not being efficient enough.

Eventually Jane was transferred from Tim and placed under a more ‘compliant’ manger who would agree with whatever Sarah wanted. Jane was eventually dismissed for the one reason while the 99 were ignored. Tim was punished for his ‘insubordinate talk’, and Sarah was happy. For Sarah, that was all that mattered.

When you work in an office, you encounter many different personalities and many different work styles. You really have no control over other people, though some do try. When you become a manager, that equation changes. You have a greater degree of control over your employee’s lives.

That control means you have a set of work to accomplish and have the resources to get that work done. It does not mean you have the only way of getting that work done. It does not mean anyone else’s way of getting work done is wrong. A good manager knows that they need to work with an employee’s style to get the best results, not dictate that the manager’s style is the only way.

It’s not about you when you are a manager. It’s about your team. If you spend your time trying to prove yourself right and ignoring the signs that you may need to adjust your ways, then you are not focusing on the team. You may get the work done, but at the cost of every other person working for you. That isn’t managing. That’s dictating. Dictating works for a while, but eventually fails.

Manage to your people, not the other way around. That way you won’t have to find 99 reasons to ignore the good and use a magnifying glass to prove your point.

The Jelly Jar

The group sat around the cafeteria table, their jars in front of them. Most of them remained silent, shaking their heads. Arlene had really underdone herself this time.

Arlene was another member of the department in the executive ranks. Over the past year, she had come to each person who was sitting at the table requesting their help. She needed their expertise, their relationships with the customers, and their time and energy. She made no excuses why she needed that help, either. She said several times, “Without your help, I can’t make the numbers I need to get my bonus.” At Arlene’s level, that ran into five figures. They appreciated her honesty and could understand her motives.

Each member around that table put in significant effort for Arlene and her bonus. They had to forego work that would contribute to their achievement of their bonuses, leverage their good will with the customers, and put in some significant extra hours. They did it for teamwork and to help a fellow member of the department.

All that extra effort worked, and Arlene made her numbers, assuring her bonus. She was generous with her words of appreciation to the group, thanking them for helping her make that bonus. At holiday time, however, the situation was different.

For each member of the team, she proudly gave them a gift of…a homemade jar of jam or jelly. To add to this, she gave them a gift card to a local coffee house, each card in the amount of $5. She remarked it made her feel good to contribute to a local charity that made jams, and gave it with a smile to each member of the team. Yes, the jellies and jams were homemade, but not by her.

Sitting at the table, each member of the team was staring at their jar of jelly or jam. On top of each of jar each member of the team had placed their high-value gift card. Eventually the silence was broken by one member of the team who made a proposal. Each person at the table would chip in for a loaf of bread, which they would bring in, use the cafeteria toaster, and they would have some delicious toast and jam, all courtesy of Arlene.

That managed to get people laughing and talking, with suggestions that they could really go for broke and buy some butter to spread on the toast and have with the jam. This evoked even more laugher and talk.

When the laughter had died down, they each made a promise. They would spend the new year focusing on their goals and reaching them with the same energy they had given to Arlene’s request. As for any further request Arlene made? They would give it the same amount of respect that she had shown them in her gifts.

The sealed that promise with a toast of their jelly jars.

The Lessons of a Pizza Lunch

The group chatted affably over the slices of pizza. It was a scene they all were familiar with. They were asked to join upper management in the conference room to bid farewell to a co-worker who was going to another job. The speeches were made about how the person would be missed and thanking them for their contributions over the years. The employees would then be invited to have some pizza and mingle.

It was all very nice, but all very familiar. For some of the employees, this was a well-worn ritual that happened well too often. For those who had been there some amount of time, their estimate was that around 75% of the company had their pizza lunch or equivalent. Even for those who were not in the company a long time, they saw an inordinate amount of pizza.

Each time it was the same. The same reasons would be given. It’s the economy. It’s the nature of the business. People just don’t want to stay around and grow with the company anymore.

The truth was a bit different. People would have stayed if there was growth with the company. Sadly, except for a few, there wasn’t. The position you were hired at was the level you stayed at. The duties you were hired to do were the duties you always did. There was no growing, no stretching, no innovation. Even when some would suggest something to grow themselves, the answer was usually in the negative. There wasn’t money for that or the person wasn’t experienced enough for that, or it would take away from their more important duties. Eventually people became frustrated or bored and looked elsewhere. Then there was pizza.

The conversation died down and people drifted back to their desks, most of the pizza left untouched. There were some grumbles about that from those paid for the pizza. Why hold these gatherings when people weren’t eating? The answer was simpler than that. People weren’t eating because they had no appetite for yet another pizza party.

Much of management and leadership is asking the right questions. When there is a path being beaten out the door, an inattentive manager will make excuses. A good manager will ask, “What is causing this outflux?” An excellent manager will ask, “What can I do to stop this outflux?” If employees are very, very lucky, that question be followed up with, “Am I doing something to cause that outflux?”

A good manager sees a problem and immediately begins to try to solve it, not make excuses about why it’s happening. They don’t default to well-worn excuses of the economy or the industry. They look first to their actions or inactions, and ask themselves some hard questions…ones in which they may not like the answers. They then take actions to solve the problem, even if it means some sacrifice on their part. It’s a difficult path, but the one that is most rewarding.

If they do it right, they find themselves not having to pay for so many pizza lunches.

The Project: Bonus Behavior

This is the third in a series of articles detailing some of the management behaviors that took place while a certain department was working on a very labor-intensive project.  This won’t be detailing the project specifically, but how management handled the stresses on the department resulting from the project.

It was in one of the team’s staff meetings that Sarah announced that Ilene, for all her hard work on the project, was to receive a bonus.  With great fanfare, she presented Ilene with the bonus, thanking her for all her hard work.

The staff clapped for Ilene, for not to do so would have attracted Sarah’s attention, and nobody wanted that.  It wasn’t that Ilene didn’t deserve the bonus. She did.  She had worked many hours as the primary person on the project.  Always known for her good cheer, she was popular with her peers, and was always ready to pitch in to help one of her fellow co-workers.  No, it wasn’t that Ilene was either disliked or didn’t deserve the award that caused the undercurrent of tension in the conference room applause.

Then what was it?  It was the face that Ilene alone was being singled out for a bonus for her work.  Many of the staff felt that the only way Ilene was able to head this project was that many of her duties had been temporarily shuttled to other people in the department.  Thus, while Ilene had her hands full with the project, the other staff members, already burdened with the work in their job, now were faced with additional responsibilities that they were accountable for.  This led to extra hours, staying late, working night and weekends, and some very stressed and tired people.

Even this would have been overlooked by the staff if they had also received some recognition for their efforts.  They hadn’t, and that bothered them.  If you just walked in and heard Sarah, everything was done by Ilene and she managed to do everything related with the project without any assistance whatsoever.

The staff didn’t even look to monetary rewards, though that would have been nice.  They were reasonable people, and being such, recognized that the department didn’t have the financial resources to hand out checks to everyone from the department who helped out in some way.  The management and leadership, though, didn’t even offer a hearty handshake to them to thank them for their efforts.  Instead, they were just given more work to do and the expectation was set that it had to get done.

What could have management and leadership done?  How about each area head take their group out to lunch on the company to thank the staff?  How about giving one half day off to each member who took on some of Ilene’s work during the project?  How about an ice cream social for the teams as a thank you, and then announcing they had the rest of the day off, and management would cover the office for the rest of the day?

No, none of that was done.  Management had made one person, Ilene, very happy, and made the rest of the staff feel as if they didn’t matter whatsoever.  Morale would sink ever lower, people would get frustrated and leave, and management would shake their head and wonder why.  After all, didn’t they just give Ilene a bonus to show their gratitude?  They would continue with their blinders, confident that they were managing things well.

As for the staff?  Well, they probably would be told that they didn’t appreciate anything management did for them, even when management didn’t do squat.

The Project: What’s In a Name?

This is the first in a set of articles detailing some of the management behaviors that took place while a certain department was working on a very labor-intensive project.  This won’t be detailing the project specifically, but how management handled the stresses on the department resulting from the project.

The department was several weeks into the work on the project, and the strain was showing on everyone.  People were working insane hours trying to get their project work done while getting their regular jobs done as well. People putting in 50 to 80 hours a week was becoming typical, and there was no end in sight.  Nights, weekends, and holidays were being taken up by project work, as were the notes from supervisors as to why a certain regular work task wasn’t done.  The silent reaction to that kind of demand was usually, “You are kidding, right?”

Many looked to the office of Sarah.  Claiming she was ‘swamped’, she had not volunteered to take any burden off of anyone regarding the project, though she had hired a temp or two for some of the tasks.  While the staff was appreciative of the temps work, they also looked skeptically as Sarah’s claim, as they were all swamped with work even before the project.  Now they were simply overloaded.

In the midst of this, Sarah had decided what her major area of focus was going to be.  She needed a new title.  Claiming her present title didn’t sufficiently convey the importance of her role, she had gone on a campaign of trying to change her title to something more appropriate.  As the machinery of this involved some of the systems that she was in charge of, she would appropriate some of the time of the people of the department to make this happen.  It didn’t seem to matter to her that her people were already beyond their capacity.  This was important to Sarah, as it would give her the title she so well deserved.

So, it came as no real surprise when a member of her department, involved in getting testing done before the deadline later that day, opened her mailbox to see a note from Sarah designated as high priority.  Opening it, they saw all the approvals necessary for the title change had come through and that Sarah had to have it officially put into the system right away, or, in Sarah speak, by end of day.

Dutifully, the employee of the department closed the testing they were doing, opened up another system, and entered the information to officially change Sarah’s title.  After saving that information, the employee looked at the clock and saw that, with the time used for that ‘high priority’ task, they would now have to stay late, again, to finish the testing for the day.  Otherwise, they risked a note from their supervisor or from Sarah herself scolding them for not getting this done, causing someone to call her and ask why the testing wasn’t done, and suggesting they really needed to manage their time better.

“Yep”, the employee thought to them self, “I now feel so much more respect for Sarah now that she has this new title.”  The employee looked to Sarah’s office.  She had decided to leave for the day, probably claiming that she deserved the time off for all the work she had done that day.

The Unexpected Response

Arnold was in a panic.  Things weren’t going the way he had planned them, and he wasn’t happy about it in the least.  If all had gone as he had manipulated, he would have had Vince exactly where he needed him, things going just as he wanted, and the near future looking good.  Unfortunately, Vince had thrown his plans into such disarray that he didn’t know what do to next.

Arnold used to be Vince’s department head.  Since taking the job, Arnold had relied upon Vince and his colleagues to look good to the client.  Arnold’s clients would ask for a solution, which Vince or one of his colleague would work hard to provide.  They were then mandated to hand it in to Arnold, who would take it to the client, take credit for it, and then reap all the praise for the great work.

In Vince’s case, Arnold added a bit extra to that formula.  On a regular basis, Arnold would criticize Vince for one thing or another, demeaning his knowledge, running down his experience, and basically making Vince feel like he was lucky Arnold didn’t fire him and that Vince was fortunate to still have a job.  This was Arnold’s way of ensuring that Vince stayed worked for him, and not seeking a better job or asking for a raise or promotion.

The whole system began to unravel when the company they worked for underwent massive downsizing and restructuring.  Within a two year span, thousands of the employees were either downsized or their business unit sold to another company.  It was a bloodbath, in no uncertain terms, and caused Arnold’s self-preservation instincts to jump into high gear.

The latest ‘restructuring’ was being announced, and though Vince no longer worked directly for Arnold, his work was integral to Arnold’s sterling reputation with his clients.  As the rest of Vince’s colleagues had already been laid off, Arnold relied upon Vince more than ever.

So, in order to keep this good thing going, Arnold announced to Vince that he was going to ‘save’ him from the latest round of layoffs.  The latest restructuring gave Arnold two employees, and he was going to make sure that Vince received one of those slots.  Vince greeted this with less enthusiasm than Arnold expected, but he accepted the offer.

A week later, after the application deadline for all the ‘restructured’ spots was over, Arnold came to Vince and told him he could no longer consider him for that position.  He used the old excuse of, ‘you don’t have the skills necessary’, though offered no explanation why he didn’t know this a week and a half ago.  In reality, Arnold had been told in no uncertain terms that, if Vince took the position, he could no longer do the work for Arnold that had made him look so good.  As this was the only reason why Arnold wanted Vince in the position, he quickly reversed course.

Realizing where this placed his gravy train, Arnold approached Vince and told him that he was going to fight to have Vince placed on a new team.  What Vince replied with threw Arnold into a tailspin.  Vince’s reply? “No, you won’t.”

If this had been a Hollywood film, Vince would have had a wonderful speech about how Arnold had finally gone too far with his lies, deceptions, manipulations, and other acts.  Instead, he simply said, “You didn’t want me the first time.  I don’t want to be part of yours or any other team in the company any longer.”  He further admonished Arnold not to try to get him on any other team.

Arnold was dumbfounded.  He had worked so long manipulating those around him to his own advantage.  He thought he had Vince convinced that he was so worthless that only Arnold’s kindness and largess was saving him. Apparently, he had underestimated Vince’s resilience, as well as his tolerance for the nearly inhuman way he and his colleagues had been treated by Arnold’s peers.

A few days later, Arnold came back to Vince to offer him another ‘solution’.  Vince could come back as a contractor!  Vince looked at Arnold and asked, “If I don’t want to be part of this place as an employee, why would I want to be part of it as a contractor?”

In the end, Vince was laid off from the company, and Arnold didn’t even wish him well on his way out. He found a position soon after, but kept in touch with some of his former colleagues.  From them he learned that, within six months, Arnold’s reputation with his clients was in tatters.  He was no longer working miracles, and his clients weren’t happy about that.  The two people he had hired for the spots under him, one of them his good friend, weren’t working out, and his life was miserable.  Vince, still healing from the abuses heaped upon him at the company, reacted with muted recognition, and got back to work at his new job.

The picture above is from an old cartoon character, Popeye the Sailor.  One of Popeye’s famous lines was, when he had enough, “That’s all I can stand; I can’t stand no more”. If your way of keeping your good people is to threaten, manipulate, criticize, and make them feel altogether lucky to have a job, be prepared to be surprised.  Each employee, like Vince, will have their Popeye moment and decide that living with the abuse is no longer the way they want to exist.  They will then do something surprising that you never expected, because your own ego won’t allow you to believe anyone but you is pulling the strings.

And, when that employee leaves, and you are left scrambling to have to fill some very big shoes, remember Popeye.  Remember as well that, if you simply treated your employees with respect and courtesy, everyone succeeds.  If you don’t, only your employees will emerge stronger at the finish.