5: Better Them

Couple months ago I saw a guy I knew at the local Safeway.

I'd known him from back in the 1990's when we were both young engineers helping a burgeoning tech giant get to its legs.  Things were good then.  We were riding high on a wave of inflated stock prices, buying Corvettes and taking expensive vacations in cities where we couldn't speak the language. We were inventing new things weekly.  You couldn't get any closer to the front of the technology spear than where we sat every day.

I hadn't seen him since those days.  Nearly 15 years now.  At first I didn't even recognize him.  I think he recognized me.  There's the way the pupils dilate when some visual blob resolves itself into an old acquaintance instead of a stranger or enemy.  His eyes said, "friend," but the body language was pure fight or flight.

Given his odd reaction I didn't say anything at first but went on with putting my grocery items on the belt to be totaled and bagged.  When I looked toward him he kept looking away, and his demeanor put me off on greeting him.

What was his problem?  What was he hiding?  Could it be I hadn't seen him in 15 years because he had been in prison or otherwise shamed to the periphery of society?

Finally I could avoid him no more.  I looked him straight in the eye.

There was a look of panic. He stuttered, then said, "Paper or plastic."  A thin line of sweat ran from his ear to his graying beard.

I said, "Plastic's ok."  I looked at his name tag, just to be sure.

It was, yes, it was.  I turned my gasp into a sigh.  Maybe I could somehow, just for that moment, not be me.

I said, "Dave?"

He said, "One-twelve ninety-five.  Need any change?"

I swiped my card.  I shook my head.

He put the rest of my groceries into plastic bags.  "Have a nice day."

Then he started swiping the groceries of the person behind me.

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I've had the opportunity to let go of a lot of people in my life.  To "let go" is a euphamism for "firing".  We like to say "let go" because more often than not the person losing their job didn't do anything to deserve losing his income.  It's just the way it is.

Business goes bad, money gets tight, can't pay the same number of people anymore.  Someone has to go so the others can go on.  It's battlefield law.  A couple get killed so the greater number can live.

When we go to work every day we don't think of it as a battlefield.  We spend so much of our waking time at the endeavor we call "work" that we try to make that time as pleasant as possible.  We bring in pictures of our families.  The father's day paperweights our youngsters made us in school.  We hang pictures of ourselves riding bikes or standing in front of amusement park castles.  It's supposed to be an extension of our being, and generally speaking, we are all pleasant beings.

Over the years I had risen the career ladder to the status of "boss".  As boss, I was in charge of bringing to an end a person's daily grind.  Usually the reason for the termination was something nebulously called "downsizing".  For whatever reason, the company wants to spend less on our activity.  We can stop supplying pencils and high-end laptops, but it  takes a lot of pencils and discount laptops to equal a working person's salary and benefits.

When you terminate someone, they say the conversation should start like this, "Joe/Sally/Bob/Betty/John/Mary - this isn't going to be easy."

It's unclear who made up that riff.  I learned it back in the 1990s.  I was taught it by a company called Challenger-Gray-Christmas, which sounds like some sort of mutant party organization group.

They taught me what to do when the person starts crying after you tell them the envelope in your hand is their last paycheck plus severance.  They tell you what to do when the person becomes violent because upon receiving his last paycheck, he knows it will take him longer to find a new job than it will for the bank to foreclose on his home.

They tell you not to smile.  They tell you to remain calm.  You are just delivering a message.  It was not your decision.  They are victim of forces beyond your small conversation.  They were killed by others, far away.  All they can do now is accept their fate and leave quietly without upsetting everyone else.

Because they are all good people - they go to their offices and collect their Father's Day paperweights, the pictures of themselves smiling in front of the Disney castles, the company logo coffee cups - they pause in front of their papers and pens, can't stop the subconscious impulse - there's a big meeting on the calendar for this afternoon, need the notes?

And they head out to the parking lot to their cars as quietly as they can, avoiding contact with any of their coworkers.  Because they're in shock.   A big part of the process of being "let go" is having the shock tame the extreme emotional impulses.

The true pain of what has just happened won't sink in until darkness falls and the recently fired worker realizes he will not grab his coffee in the morning and head into the office.  Then the anguish and grief will set in.  Tears will fall.  The man will avoid his wife because he has failed her.  The kids will be kept away because no one has ever seen him this way.  The woman's tears will fill the phone receiver and dot the bills on the kitchen counter.

How could this have happened to me?  I was good.  I worked hard.  I delivered.  I cared.

I've used that line, "This is going to be difficult," exactly once.   I still have nightmares about it.

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Most managers are bad at it.

Bad managers are put in positions of authority by other bad managers.  It's a Ponzi scheme.

This should surprise no one.

Every year corporations spend hundreds of millions of dollars on management training.  They select individuals and place them into management roles and then figure that a couple days of training will set everything right.  These people are usually as good at management as Vincent Van Gogh, Steven Hawking, or Elvis Presley.   Which is to say - what the hell are we thinking?

Usually  these individuals are selected because they have performed extremely well in individual contribution roles.  Or because they are great individual contributors and their grandmothers won't be proud of them until they can come home and say they've been made "manager," so they're going to quit and go somewhere where they can get that title.

They are then offered the slot right in the company they're at, and to make up for that awful decision they get sent to a training course.  This will fix it, thinks somebody in higher management who goes on to worrying about other things.

Then, the newly minted leader goes back to work to make life miserable for 2 to 100 people.  

They  may as well have been given a week's training in concert piano and sending them off to Carnage Hall to wow the whole world. 

Things are going good when he takes over - then mistakes get made.  Unlike when the new manager was an individual worker, every mistake is multiplied by the number of people in his charge.  Tiny mistakes become very visible.  The great employee doesn't make such mistakes, so they either must be hidden, or even better - they didn't happen.  It must be the fault of the workers in his charge who either can't understand his wisdom or don't share his vision and energy.

Eventually the bad performance can't be hidden. Upper management wants to know how to improve things.  They're hearing about bad morale and they can see the lousy productivity with their own eyes. They wonder if people shouldn't be let go.  As easily as he ascribes blame, the new manager is scared to death of the idea of firing someone.  He knows how he used to feel about it when he wasn't a manager.  He doesn't want to become one of "those" managers.  He's a man of the people.  He wants to be loved.

But upper management wants to teach him the important skills of business.  He must be crisp, direct, and ruthless to some degree.  Too many things are going wrong.  If he doesn't trim out the "fat" in his team, maybe he's the wrong guy for the job.

So he goes to the human relations department.  They will tell him how to do this thing and stay legal.  They choose a victim.  Some days later a meeting is held.  No one is surprised.  Things were going so bad he was going to have to blame someone.

Words are spoken.  "This isn't going to be easy."

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There are fabulous managers in this world, the same way there are amazing guitarists and mind-blowng poets.  And then there's just a whole spate of plain good managers,  the way there are a lot of good piano players and plenty of pleasing novelists.

They get into tight situations like everyone else, only they tend to have the support of everyone who works for them.  

You want to work for these people.  You want to be one of these people.  

Just because you want to, doesn't mean you can, any more than you can stay home next week and write a bestselling novel.

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No one wakes up in the morning and says, "Let me go be a bad manager today."  Or, "Gee, I'm a bad manager I should go do something different."

Most bad managers are frightened unhappy people who live in fear of things going wrong, and they always go wrong.  But somehow things get fixed.  The people who work for them come through every now and then and make things right.  Then they can breathe easy.  

They wake up in the morning and think, "Is today a day I should be afraid, or can I breathe easy?"

It doesn't occur to them these mood swings are caused directly by their own ineffectiveness.  They figure things are happening to them from the outside.  And things bad things happen to good people, all the time.

When it's time to figure out how to make something better, the bad manager will look to his people and try to penetrate their weaknesses rather than accentuating their strengths.  The weaknesses are obvious to everyone, the strengths, sometimes hidden.  And if it takes a while to come to a good conclusion, the company can afford to wait.  If things start going bad, everyone sees it right away.

So the bad manager always has a list in his head.  Who goes first?  Next time I have to let someone go, who is it.

Then, when things get tight, he offers up his victim.

"This is going to be tough."

"I don't understand.  What did I do?"

"At least," thinks the bad manager while his shocked employee's eyes well in front of him, "At least it's not me."

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"You didn't even say, 'hi,' to him?" asks the blond-haired girl as we drive home.

"He wouldn't make eye contact."

"You could have asked him how he was."

"I could see how he was.  He's got 25 years experience in high tech and he's a cashier at Safeway.  How do you think he is?"

We stopped for the red light at route nine.  An old Genesis song came up on the satellite radio.  It reminded me of being a kid.

"This really bothers you," she said to me.

"Well, yeah.  Are things really that bad that a guy with Dave's skills is working at a grocery store?  I don't think so.  I think the business world is just populated by jerks.  They've got a lock.  The good guys can't win."

"Maybe you should go back and talk to him."

"That could be me - don't you get it?  There's no difference between him and me."

"Then help him."

"How?"

"Offer him a job."

"We've got a damned hiring freeze -- I just don't know what I can do."

I  made a left hand turn.  The light was still red.  Horns blared from all angles.  We didn't cause an accident, luckily.  There were no cops.

"I can't do anything..."

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Three months later I was fired by a bad manager who was afraid his weaknesses would be exposed and I would get his job.

I didn't want his job.  I was happy supporting him and helping him out.  But he was so afraid he couldn't imagine anyone helping him out, much less the guy he saw as a competitor.

He started the conversation:  "Joe, this is going to be difficult."

Damn right.