Employees Gone Wild Page 4
The yelling, screaming meltdown could be heard in every corner of the floor.
Nor was this Pete’s only culinary eccentricity. I was in a conference room speaking with our office porter when Pete’s assistant burst into the room and yelled to the porter, “Thank God I found you! I’ve been looking all over for you. Pete needs his bagel right away—get downstairs now!”
As I learned from the porter later, Pete was convinced that only this employee, in the entire company, knew the “right” way to toast and cut up his bagel. No other hands were permitted, under any circumstances, to touch it.
Divergence from Pete’s very precise demands invariably led to a crazed reaction. Irate doesn’t even begin to cover it. With these kinds of people, hostility and anger management issues will often creep into every aspect of their lives, and hence every aspect of work.
Pete’s persnickety ways were evident as well in his interviewing style. No potential job candidate could meet his unachievable expectations. He would routinely belittle job candidates for what he called their “stupid” responses. After receiving several complaints from job applicants, whenever possible we kept Pete out of the recruitment process. However, when it came to hiring a new personal assistant for Pete (surprised there was a vacancy in that plum job?), there was no avoiding him. After all, the candidate would be working closely with him and might as well know what he or she was getting into.
Did I mention that, at this point, Pete was twice divorced? Shocking, I know.
During a first interview with a prospective assistant, an attractive woman, Pete told her, “I am not sure I will hire you for the position, but I’m pretty sure you will end up being my wife.”
He did hire her, and in due course, he also married her. Not surprising from his point of view, used as he was to getting his way, but I’m not sure what she was thinking, especially after she’d worked with him.
They were divorced in less than two years. I guess she never figured out just how he liked his bagel. Pete must have had some appeal that wasn’t obvious to the rest of us, though: he’s been married twice more since then.
CASE FILE
Nobody’s Perfect (Enough)
A high-level partner at a law firm was a fitness nut. That didn’t just mean that he was obsessed with his own fitness: he was obsessed with everyone else’s as well. He routinely told employees they were fat or complained that they had no business eating fattening foods. He was known to snatch a bag of chips or candy out of an employee’s hands if he or she dared even possess such a thing in his presence. His obsession with appearance also extended to how staff dressed. He complained if he thought anyone in his office wore “cheap” clothes or outfits that he didn’t approve of.
But even if a staff member looked and dressed perfectly, there was no pleasing this unpleaseable fellow. Anything that wasn’t done to his precise specifications, which included reading his mind, was deemed “****ing everything up.” Once, his assistant had trouble deciphering his notoriously bad handwriting in order to give him a phone number that he had written down but neglected to copy into his cell phone before leaving on a trip. He demanded to know if she was “****ing stupid” and called her an “idiot” for not having transcribed the number immediately and not having put it in his cell phone for him. Never mind that because he was the one who had taken down the number, the assistant never knew the number existed until he called her to find it.
This man made people so anxious that some employees literally had nosebleeds after dealing with him! But he was another high-powered, “untouchable” individual. If employees didn’t like his comments, their only recourse was to quit. Because the firm paid top dollar (probably because that’s what it took to get people to come work there; reputations tend to spread quickly within an industry), people stayed and collected their hazardous-duty pay until they reached the absolute breaking point. Only then did they jump ship.
Executives of this stripe can burn through dozens or even hundreds of assistants. Many remain shockingly obtuse. Instead of wondering why all their assistants quit, they ask, “Isn’t there at least one decent assistant in this city?”
I heard of one boss, also an attorney, whose assistants sometimes didn’t last through the first day. More than one waited for the boss to go to lunch, left a note on his desk, resigning, grabbed their coats, and left. When he found one he liked, he delivered his highest compliment: “You’re less stupid than most of the others.”
One female executive with a big ego was having problems retaining an assistant. She was an abusive and totally demanding individual who had gone through more than eighty assistants—all female—in nine years. I thought she might be slightly less abusive to a man, so I suggested she try hiring a male assistant. By that time, anything was worth a try.
In response to my suggestion, the woman replied, “No, I’ve tried that before. The trouble is that every male assistant I hire ends up getting a crush on me.” I think she was mistaking fear for love.
TIPS
One Easy Tip for Keeping an Assistant
Treat your assistant like you would want to be treated. News flash: Calling people names doesn’t engender trust or loyalty. And is it really a productive use of your time to have to train a new person every week?
TIPS
If Your Boss Is the Asshole
You’re not obligated to put up with abuse.
• Decide how much it’s worth to you, personally and professionally, to keep this job. If you can let it roll off you and collect the paycheck, great. Bullies get their satisfaction from making people cower. If you don’t cower, the bully may lose interest.
• Talk to Human Resources. If it’s the first time, they will want to know. They can’t fix it if they don’t know about it.
• If your boss goes through staff like tissues during allergy season, HR already knows that it’s the boss, not you, that’s the problem. Management will have to determine how much the boss is worth to the company, and if he or she is worth a lot, HR may not be able to solve the problem. But it’s worth a try because not all abusive bosses are as untouchable as they think they are.
MEMO TO MANAGEMENT
An executive with anger-management or other issues relating to interpersonal relationships may not be satisfied with treating employees badly. Such behavior has a tendency to spill over into external business relationships as well. Once a higher-up realizes that he or she can behave in any fashion with impunity, unprofessional behavior has a tendency to escalate. Reflect carefully on whether that is consistent with smart business practices and what the consequences will be to your company if this executive starts treating business partners with the same arrogance he or she shows to staff. This could be a disaster in the making for your company. Nip it in the bud if you can.
CASE FILE
You Can Sleep when You’re Dead—If This Job Doesn’t Kill You First
Sometimes, assistants are forced to mistreat other employees on behalf of their bosses. With their own jobs at stake, loyalty to peers can go out the window. One managing partner was a night owl. As a result, so was his assistant—whether she liked it or not. She never got lonely working those long nights: it was common for the night owl to order her to call employees at home about whatever he was working on—never mind that it might be three o’clock in the morning. No answering the call then rolling over and going back to sleep, either. “Get up, splash cold water on your face, and get into the office now!” the assistant ordered, at the night owl’s behest. As a result, she was every bit as unpopular as he was.
Even the weekend is not sacred to some higher-ups. Another high-level executive, Wally, routinely scheduled meetings on weekends, just like it was another workday. He especially liked to schedule hour-long individual meetings with various teams of employees, starting at 11:00 a.m. on Saturday. Adding insult to injury—or perhaps injury to insult—Wally himself never bothered to arrive at the office until 2:00 p.m. or later, which threw the schedule wildly out o
f whack. His luckless subordinates didn’t dare to show up late themselves, however, because Wally demanded that everyone be there at their assigned times, whether or not he was present—and he’d been known to check up on people. So the meetings might not actually start until 3:00 or 4:00 p.m. and would run until 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. on Saturday night.
Normally, if you are an hourly employee, you would be paid overtime to work extra hours like this. If you are a salaried employee (“exempt,” in HR parlance), however, there are no time clocks and no overtime: you are expected to get the job done no matter what it takes. Most companies don’t abuse that and may even let salaried employees slip out early occasionally in recompense for the times they work nights or weekends, but very long hours are not uncommon in certain industries and at certain companies. At Wally’s place, it was take it or leave it. Everyone knew it was “the cost of poker,” or what you did if you wanted to make the big bucks. You sucked it up, waited around for Wally to make his grand entrance, or risked losing your high-paying job.
So much for weekend plans.
CASE FILE
Weekend Warriors
In companies where staff are expected to work long hours, where everyone wants the boss to see them as the first one in the office and the last one out, some employees become experts in the fine art of office staging: making it look as though they are in the office early in the morning, late at night, or through the weekend without actually being there all the time. This involves such strategies as leaving office lights on; tossing a jacket over the back of the chair; scattering eyeglasses, half-consumed food, and open cans of soda on the desk (expert office stagers will warn against using coffee for this ruse; the boss can tell you’re not there if it’s been sitting there long enough to be ice-cold); and making sure the computer screen is on, with a document open. The idea is to make it look like you just stepped away for a minute (or the rapture came and snatched you up) should the boss happen by to check on your whereabouts when you have the audacity to go home.
Sometimes, setting such a clever scene isn’t enough, especially in this electronic age. One minion, Terry, was assigned the unenviable task of monitoring whether or not employees came in on the weekend, and when and for how long, and reporting to a senior partner. Terry didn’t want to have to spend the entire weekend circling the office checking who was really in and when. So she put technology to use for her.
On weekends, because the building’s front desk wasn’t staffed (to assure that only authorized personnel had access to the upper floors), one had to enter a passcode into a keypad to access the elevator bank. Each employee had a passcode, and building management could see exactly who had used the elevator and when during the off hours. Terry arranged to get a report from building security on Monday mornings, which she proudly presented to her boss as evidence who had come in when over the weekend. If an employee’s name wasn’t on Terry’s list, he or she better have a darn good excuse—a medical emergency at the very least!
One poor soul had the temerity to tell Terry that he hadn’t come in on the past weekend because he was caught up on all his work. He found himself with three new projects on his plate and quickly learned his lesson.
To encourage people to stay late and actually work, rather than just continuing to find ways to fake being at the office, one company ordered in and provided dinner for its employees every night at half past eight. Attendance at the communal dinner hour was highly encouraged—as in, if you want to be promoted, be at dinner. Everyone knows there is no such thing as a free lunch. That firm proved that there is no such thing as a free dinner, either!
TIPS
Getting a Life
• Leaving a spreadsheet or half-written email open on your computer may seem like a fail-safe way to look like you’re still there hours after you make your exit, but technology has got you beat: your company may be monitoring exactly what you do on your computer and know that nary a keystroke has been made since four o’clock.
• If you’re in one of those places where everyone competes to be the last one to leave, and you’re staying late to win that contest, you might as well do actual work during that time. After all, if you care about this job enough to give up your evening or weekend for it, you might as well put in the effort that will get you rewarded for those long hours with a raise or promotion.
• Nobody but you can decide how much you’re willing to give up for your job. If you’re trying to make an impression or are in a highly competitive field, long hours may be the price you pay for the chance to get ahead. If the demands become unreasonable or even unhealthy, you might point out to your boss that after a certain point, people are too tired to do quality work, and productivity suffers when things have to be redone.
• If your boss isn’t hearing any of that, you might want to have a confidential conversation with your human resources representative. He or she may not know how hard people are being driven or may be able to give you a reality check about the situation. It may be that they can help you, or maybe you’ll find that this just isn’t the job for you.
• Depending what field you’re in, or where you are, there may be rules limiting how many hours you can be employed to work. It’s worth investigating if you think there’s a problem.
MEMO TO MANAGEMENT
If you’re in a position of power at your job, remember that you’re an integral part of setting the tone at the office. Your behavior can determine whether people come to work filled with dread or with enthusiasm—and that will color not just their relationship with you but the quality of their work. Keeping people in the office until midnight just because you can, or losing your temper on an intern who’s brought you the wrong sandwich, or watching over people’s shoulders to make sure they are working every single minute—none of this flexing of your executive muscles will earn you respect or loyalty.
And what goes around comes around: an employee who is a mere minion today may at some point down the road—whether a year from now or a decade later—be a person from whom you need a favor. Or worse: he or she may end up as your boss!
CASE FILE
Talkative Tim
Tim was a manager who liked to catch people by phone—and once hooked, he didn’t let anyone go. Once you picked up a call from Tim, you could plan on being chained to the phone for at least an hour, usually more. Not that you would be saying much: what Tim wanted, mostly, was an audience. He did all the talking. He seldom even stopped for a breath—a miracle of lung capacity.
Heaven forbid an underling tried to cut Tim short with a “Got to go now” or “I have another call” or “I’m really busy.” Job number one, in Tim’s view, was listening to him, and anyone who tried to cut him short was treated to an extra-long chewing-out.
One day, I was called down to the office of a senior executive—yes, even senior management fell prey to talkative Tim. When I got to the executive’s office, he was on a phone call with Tim. Seeing me in his doorway, the executive signaled for me to come in and sit on the couch while he wrapped up his call with Tim. After five minutes or so with no sign of the conversation concluding (on this end it was mainly “uh huh” and similar sounds of acknowledgment), the executive finally put the phone receiver upside down in his lap and proceeded to have a fifteen-minute talk with me. The drone of Tim’s monologue issuing from between the executive’s thighs served as background to our conversation.
When we had finished our business, the executive lifted the receiver back to his ear. Tim hadn’t even paused.
Suddenly the executive cut Tim off midstream, shouting: “Tim, stop, stop. STOP. You have been in my crotch for the last fifteen minutes, and if you don’t shut up and listen to me, you are going right back to my crotch!”
This had the desired effect . . . at least until Tim’s next phone call to an underling.
TIPS
The Forever Call
• Hygienically speaking, your crotch might not be the best place to put the phone—after all, it�
�s going back up to your face later. A speaker phone with a mute button is a better solution for dealing with a long-winded caller and won’t lead to someone walking into your office and wondering exactly what you’re doing with that phone.
• Are you the endless interlocutor of your office? How long are your calls? Have you noticed people don’t pick up if they know it’s you? Make sure phone calls have a purpose and are concise and to the point. You don’t want to end up in someone else’s crotch, do you?
CHAPTER 3
Welcome to the Nut House
Your colleagues are your potential allies, the people in the trenches with you every day. When you want to commiserate about your heavy workload or gossip at the water cooler or just complain to someone about the new brand of coffee in the break room, these are your comrades. You probably spend more waking hours with your coworkers than you do with your family. And just like your family, some days you love them; other days, not so much. Just remember, if you tick them off (or they tick you off), you’re still going to be stuck with them, so it’s important to tread carefully.
In a perfect world, you’ll love your colleagues more than you hate them, you’ll have fun together at work, and each of you will look out for the other. If you do live in that perfect world, the rest of us envy you. But the rest of us, over the course of a career, meet and work with quite a mixture of characters. The key is learning how to get along with all of them.
CASE FILE