Tag: Employees Under Scrutiny

Fair Enough

It’s the new year and time to empty last year’s OUT basket.

By this time, appraisals along with evaluations of long term potential, succession plans, promotions, raises, bonuses and so on are in the books. But, once all was said and done, it seems like something more should be said about some of the things that were done.

I admit to being particularly vexed by our bonus system. It is discretionary. That means, in theory, that we have a meritocracy and those who deserve greater consideration will get it. What generally happens, though, is that more senior employees gobble up greater chunks of the pie simply because they are perceived as more valuable. Which means that the bonus system is tiered, not by rating but by level. (See what I did there?)

Do you remember Jessica? She provides content for various social media platforms. She was able to play the system, getting us to pay half of her husband’s very expensive medical plan. That whole business left the Black Widow’s eight eyes looking out of a glass darkly for months. That’s a lot of glowering.

Jessica’s performance met expectations but did not go much beyond them. Whiny Baby, as usual, found reasons to dim the glow on any of her reports and Jessica did not rise above the dreary outlook on her department as a whole.

The Black Widow, with an octet of furrowed brows, was still chafing.

As we have pointed out on several occasions, social media is not an area that captures the attention, much less the imagination, of our senior managers. They generally feel that social media is set up for self-promotion or mischief. Neither contributes to brand building but both could serve as a motivation and a weapon in wrong but capable hands. So take no chances, give Jessica something – a couple of thousand, say – and call it a day.

I argued that we are giving her too much credit. Rigor Mortis, our wise but weather-beaten legal advisor, pointed out that awarding a bonus is a de facto judgment on performance that can be levered against us if we ever decided to terminate. The Black Widow, with an octet of furrowed brows, was still chafing. Jessica did enough to earn her salary, she said, but not enough to merit a bonus. “And would two grand even be enough?” she wondered aloud. To use an analogy from Winston Churchill, can you satisfy a tiger by feeding it cat’s meat?

Ironically, that last query settled the matter. Our practical and otherwise parsimonious CEO, the Man from Glad, figured that if no one was truly happy by the amount of the bonus, it must be fair. So, we shrugged two grand her way and moved on.

Still Waters Run Deep

“Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them… there is nothing.” – Jean-Paul Sartre

Would that this were the case. But Sartre was wrong. He was overly existential. He believed that existence supersedes essence. To this observer at least, it is the essence – not the existence – of things that tell the story. Certainly, as inscrutable as things may appear on the surface, they tell this story.

Ben is a program manager who works with architects, engineers and other specifiers. He has boundless energy and speaks volumes when just a few words would probably do. But there is another side to Ben that no one sees. Or, to be more precise, there is an underside to Ben that no one realizes is there.

The first issue is that Ben disappears. The presumption is always that he is on the road, but that is not a certainty. Indeed, the constant query, where is Ben? has become something of a joke in the Small Office. I do not see it as a thing to be laughed at and worry that there is something amiss. But he does his job well and, short of prying into his personal business, there is nothing to be done about it.

His face was more stony than solemn.

Recently, the wife of a staff member died and most in the office went to the funeral. The church was large and, with its vaulted ceilings and majestic stained glass windows, something to behold. Ben sat alone, in the very far corner of the very last pew near massive oak doors. Ben is hardly a loner but, here, in this place, he kept to himself. He did not move through the entire service. His face was more stony than solemn; I am not sure he blinked even once. It was as if this place held for him a past he preferred not to revisit. I could not help but feel that there was something happening here but, short of prying into his personal business, there was nothing to be done about it.

Last week, the Black Widow, our very existential and, by her own assessment, very essential V.P. of human resources, came to see me. It had come to her attention that Ben has a drinking problem. She wondered if I knew anything about that. I looked at her quizzically. What do you mean by “drinking problem”? There are plenty on staff who can drink me under the table with no ill effects. Put Cowboy Bob at the head of the list. But of all those in the commercial team who would stop in for a pint at the slightest provocation, I would have considered Ben the least likely. Somehow, someone saw something that led to a conclusion that may or may not be valid. I imagine our Black Widow will pry into his personal business and then decide what to do about it.

So what is Ben’s story? Can we make it out based on the fragments we see and the snippets others hear? More importantly, should we try?

Pyramid Scheme

I was having a coffee in the small lounge reserved for senior managers. We had installed a Tassimo-compatible machine and I was trying out the Dark Italian Roast – a full-bodied selection, says the pod, made with 100% high quality Arabica beans. It has an extra bold taste that is both sharp and intense. (Sounds like a bout at the dentist.)

I was sharing what might otherwise have been a contemplative moment with our CFO, General Ledger. He is a curiosity, with ears that make him look like Mars with its two moons. To the left, Phobos. To the right, Deimos. He is no Jupiter, thank goodness; its 67 moons would certainly have made him something to ponder.

So General Ledger was talking about this kid, Jason. Jason is working for the summer in the Accounting Department, entering data. A philosophy major, he is exactly wrong for this job, but a paycheck is a paycheck.

It seems that Anne, Jason’s supervisor, was complaining about him. Jason has six or seven stacks of soft drink cans in his cubicle, each can precariously perched on the one below – or, as he would say it, under the one above. He refers to the stacks as pyramids, which Anne finds stupid and annoying. The stacks are, apparently, in a race to reach the top lip of the office dividers. On his desk is a robot made entirely of thumbtacks and elastic bands. Anne has concluded that he had to be building this stupid thing on company time, although she does admit that it really does look like a robot.

A philosophy major, he is exactly wrong for this job.

To further confound Anne’s sensibilities, Jason works off-kilter hours, which he can do because, after all, he just enters data. He comes in at 10:00, works through the noon hour and takes his lunch at 1:30. So in the early afternoon, when everyone else is working, he is sitting back, reading Descartes’ Discourse on Method or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The other employees look at him and think he is goofing off. Then he leaves after everyone is gone, so no one knows what he is doing.

Also vexing for Anne, who would have made a good puritan, is that Jason is cute and all the young ladies in her group find reasons to drop in on him and chat. Jason is nothing if not polite and he accommodates them with charm and cordiality.

Sounds like a fine lad, I said. So what is the issue? Well, he answered, his outsized ears turning scarlet, Jason is clearly not a fit.

I sipped my very bold coffee slowly. It was still hot. Does he get the job done? I asked. Yes. Does he make mistakes? No. Hmmph, I said, in my best Tom Selleck. Clearly not a fit.

Well, I suggested, if he is cordial and likes working later hours, why not transfer him to our Customer Care Center where he could be a service rep. Then everyone would be happy… except, I suppose, the girls in Accounting.

General Ledger’s eyes lit up. Of course! Why had he not thought of that?

I don’t know. Why? But then, like the man said, as long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?

But Words Are All I Have

“By their fruits ye shall know them.” – The Bible, St. Matthew 7:20

For most people, that is to say, for ordinary people, what we feel we can do and what we actually do are seldom the same thing. Patrick K. is a very ordinary person making an extraordinary salary and, frankly, for the salary, we thought he would do more.

PK is a senior account manager. Having been around a long time, he is well known in the industry. But being well known in the industry is like being a large hen in a henhouse. So what? If you want to make an impression – if you really want to impress the hens – hire a fox.

In fact, the Small Office recruited PK away from a competitor based primarily on a reputation he himself carefully cultivated for over twenty years. But reputation is a shadow. It gets longer or shorter depending on where you stand. Ultimately, it disappears in the light of day.

If you truly want to impress the hens, hire a fox.

PK certainly talks the talk and in the evangelist role for which he was hired, I suppose that should be good enough. But it is a year later and PK is still talking. And talking. And in all that time, I have not found that he has had a singular thought of his own. Winston Churchill once said that large views will always triumph over small ideas. But what triumph is there over one who has no ideas at all.

He can come up with a perfectly compelling argument, but here, in the land of PowerPoint, PK has yet to put together a cohesive presentation. He cannot analyze, strategize or plan. How could he have advanced his career to this level without any skills whatsoever?

The last straw for me came yesterday when we visited a potential client that PK has been wooing for months. He has wined them and dined them and placed their company on a pedestal like it was the Statue of Liberty and we were the tired, the poor, the wretched refuse of some teeming shore.

Shortly after our arrival, a senior manager from this potential client leaned over to me and said, curiously, “So what is it that your company does?” I was astonished.

Perhaps that is PK’s greatest strength. Having virtually nothing to work with, he still manages to astonish. That alone is an achievement worthy of note.

Pop Goes the Weasel

I was asked to assess the performance of a portfolio manager who I have, in the past and for good reason, referred to as The Weasel. He has a tiny face with sharp teeth, small round ears and the blackest of eyes. His neck is thick and his torso slender, so that the one flows unimpeded into the other. He is a silent hunter, skulking around in the high grass and thick hedge. He is a very political creature, squeezing in and out of tight spots, a master of innuendo, implication and impeccable timing. There is no question he gets the job done, but one always has to wonder on whom he is doing it.

I took him out to lunch, a favored custom in The Small Office. Food – going out or ordering in – is not just what we do; it is a way of being. True, it would be odd for it to be just the two of us, but I took him to a restaurant down the street from the office where you can always count on others to be within earshot. In other words, it was very public and perfectly safe. So even a clever beast like The Weasel would not be able to sniff out a rat… which I wasn’t because, in truth, I was being more the weasel. I would be wending my way into his burrow. Those of you who think it takes one to know one might imagine that he would see me coming. But you would be mistaken, for few ever recognize themselves.

He took my casual approach as good news.

My purpose was primarily to get his take on how things were going, how he felt he was doing, where he saw himself fitting in the organization. I wondered if he saw himself at all as others saw him, if he would overrate or understate his accomplishments. I gave no sign, no hint, no inkling of dissatisfaction. And since his ears were always cocked for the slightest sound of shuffling, he took my casual approach as good news. His basic mistake was in gauging my manner instead of reckoning my purpose.

Clearly he believed he had done an excellent job in the past year – even if his singular achievement was in portraying how excellent it was. So it came as a shock to him when he received a 2 (out of 5) performance rating, which translates in The Small Office system as a Requires Improvement. He was too concerned with bureaucracy, procedure and politics to take risks, to think out of the box, to engage in meaningful teamwork, to sacrifice for the good of the whole. He kept valuable information under wraps and offered up insights only when they could be foolproof and fully ascribed to him. All this not only kept back the team, but made us wonder how far he personally could progress. Stalking is, after all, a solitary business.

The Weasel came to me a few days after his appraisal. He wondered aloud why I led him on, why I was not honest with him. He disagreed with our assessment, of course, but that was beside the point. Well, it was the whole point but his questions were fair. I wasn’t dishonest with him, but I certainly wasn’t forthcoming.

Full of courtesy, full of craft, eh? All I could do was shrug.