job – 15 Minute Copy

Judge A Person By Their Questions Rather Than Their Answers. Or Just Fire Them And Be Done With It.

February 3, 2023

It’s been a bit of a week at my place of employment. Just finished up a “workforce reduction,” or “employee rebalancing,” or “rightsizing,” or whatever the euphemism du jour is for layoffs. And judging by my LinkedIn feed, so did everyone else. It’s been a helluva few months around these parts, and if you still have a job, congratulations. If you were one of those “impacted,” or “affected,” or “transitioned,” or whatever the euphemism du jour is for getting fired, you have my sincerest sympathy. It sucks. I’ve been there. And it sucks.

This stuff is cyclical, apparently, and necessary for the health of a company, and we’re just supposed to accept that, I guess. Every 4 or 5 or 6 years or so, people’s lives—hard-working, talented, dedicated people—are just going to have to suck it up, cross their fingers, tell their family not to worry, and hope its the coworker next to you whose number is up this time around and not you. And it sucks.

But I have questions. I don’t know, maybe I’m stupid (possible), or naive (likely), or crazy (certain), but I just don’t understand why this has to keep happening. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results, we all must be mad. And it sucks.

So here, in no specific order, are the things I’m too stupid or naive or crazy enough to understand:

They fired that person? I’ve seen some shocking names in my feed telling the world that they’ve been laid off. People who I personally know and have worked with and have experienced firsthand the brilliance they bring to the table every day of their professional life. That’s the person they chose to let go? Why them? What’s the criteria? Is it random? Throwing darts at a bunch of names until some quota has been met? Sure, the PR folks put together a bunch of corporate speak sound bites about how “the business is realigning around new strategic initiatives” and the such, but that doesn’t mean anything. It’s a black box in many cases. In most cases. Which in turn causes me to wonder…

How can they be so terrible at messaging these things? The boilerplate platitudes from the creative writing experts over at legal are almost worse than if they said nothing. Obviously, they can’t say nothing, though. They have to position this stuff as sound business strategy. Sure, these are hard decisions, but running a company is hard. We regular folks don’t understand this. You’d have to have the immense brain power of a C-suite executive to even possibly comprehend how these things come to pass. Keeping the company’s stock price up isn’t easy. Which in turn causes me to wonder…

Would a temporary drop in stock price be the end of the world? Being profitable isn’t enough; profits have to grow. Constantly. That’s why CEOs get paid the big bucks. That’s why CEO compensation is tied to improvements in the stock price and has nothing to do with employee satisfaction or retention rates, or metrics that measure the internal health of a company.

Quiet Quitting? How About You Loudly STFU.

August 23, 2022

In many ways, history is driven by the struggle between those who have vs. those who want. Or need, depending on the prism through which you interpret class struggle. Either way, many of the cultural changes that have led humanity to where it is today were the product of the masses looking for a bit more. Time. Safety. Money. More of something that was scarce for them and that they wanted in greater abundance. A broad generalization of the progress of humankind, but I’ll stand by it.

In addition, these incidents have often been driven by unexpected events outside anyone’s control. Most recently, the global Covid pandemic and subsequent shift in modalities among knowledge workers from office life to remote participation. Having the technology to allow this transition to happen literally overnight in many cases and with minimal if any loss of productivity gave many employees pause as they started to reconsider the need to continue the industrial revolution habit of 8-hour work days and 40-hour weeks that included unpaid commuting times on the top so they could show up in an uninspired office colocated with people, most of whom they never professionally interacted with anyway. After a year or so of no longer having to do all that, many workers, when faced with the prospect of returning to that life, to their great credit, thought to themselves: “fuck that.“

Naturally, the businesses that operated relatively seamlessly through the preceding period, where their workers were given much greater control over their existence, work/life balance, and sanity, were shocked. After all, hadn’t they spent all of this money on real estate, office furniture, and conference rooms to make these workers more productive and indeed happy? In turn, when faced with the prospect of eating all that capital investment, they also thought to themselves: “fuck that.“

One of the manifestations of this employer/employee tug of war is the insinuation that businesses are no longer getting the pound of flesh they pay their workers handsomely for. Rather than focusing on business outcomes (one of their favorite pre-pandemic rallying cries), they told tales of workers stealing from their benevolent employers. The theft was no longer Post-It notes and Sharpies from the supply closet; now, they were stealing time. It’s hard to ensure that you’re getting the 8-hour days and 40-hour weeks you pay so much for when you no longer have a physical panopticon within which to ensure you are getting value for money.

I don’t know how this growing, if not subtle conflict, will eventually play out, but I will say this: “workers of the world unite!” Even if we all do it from the comfort of our own homes.

Manager In The Middle

August 21, 2022

I never set out to be a middle manager. Like most people, I imagine how and where I started my career is not something I can really explain this far down the path. Of course, I can trace my employment history back through my resume and LinkedIn, but how all the pieces fit together and why I made certain decisions to stay or leave certain employers doesn’t even seem to make much sense to me now. I can tell a compelling story for sure, but like most stories, where the truth lies is in the eye of the reader.

I do enjoy my middle management job. Or at least parts of it. And I happen to be pretty good at it as well. I love helping people be successful. I love being the lynchpin for solving complex problems by empowering people. I love making employees and customers happy. If making people happy was all I had to do, I’d have one of the greatest jobs in the world.

Alas, there’s a lot more to it than that. And of course, everyone has to shovel shit sometimes, as my dad used to tell me. Fair enough. What I don’t subscribe to, however, is the tension between having limited control over my circumstances yet full responsibility for the outcomes. The biggest piece of fiction I ever heard was “people don’t quit their company; they quit their manager.” Utter and total bullshit. I certainly accept that there are terrible managers in the world that are all but impossible to work for, but to make a blanket statement like that is a dereliction of reality bordering on the irresponsible. I, for one, have never quit because of a manager. Even ones that I didn’t particularly like or respect. But that’s just me. What do I know? I’m only a middle manager.