Читать книгу The Faithful Manager: Using Your God Given Tools for Workplace Success - Anthony E Shaw - Страница 10

A number of times in my work life I’ve had to terminate the employment of colleagues, almost always in one on one situations, not mass layoffs. In a number of these situations, some time later I’ve come across these individuals again and they’ve told me two things.

1.Thank you for the respectful way in which you treated me during a difficult time.

2.Being fired turned out to be a blessing in disguise; I just couldn’t see that at the time.

Surprising? It still is to me but it’s true. It really isn’t about what you need to do (unless you will be violating your own humanity) as much as it is about how you are motivated to do it. When you take your lead from within yourself, from the light of your faith, even the most difficult management decisions will be morally clear and practically sound.

Four times so far in my life I’ve been directed to end the employment of colleagues who had become my personal friends. I will tell you upfront that all remained my personal friends. My experience with one in particular, Wayne, is an abiding lesson for me.

Wayne and I became instant friends during my first two months in a new company. Wayne led one of the company’s expanding product areas and I was the human resource leader. We met at a staff meeting and I was taken by Wayne’s natural charm and his openness. Wayne hailed from Texas and his smooth, considered style of speech told me he was a proud son of that great state. If you met him, you’d like him – he just had a naturally likable personality. When he and I struck up a conversation, I realized there was a lot more to him than just charm. His insight about the people with whom he worked was on target. He was grounded securely in a set of personal values that respected each person as an individual and an equal.

At the heart of his values was his commitment as a born again Christian. He didn’t announce it or flaunt it, he lived it. At a point in our relationship when we talked about faith, Wayne said simply, “I’m a Christian, born again and that’s how I live my life.”

Soon after we met, I began asking Wayne to keep his eyes and ears open for specific issues in the various company offices to which he traveled regularly. I knew that not only would he be able to hear what was on folks’ minds in the company, but he was also trusted by every one of our colleagues.

For three years Wayne served the company, giving all of his efforts to try to right-size a problem product. Further complicating his work was a convoluted profit and loss system that hid inefficiencies and shifted losses so that some products looked to be better performers than they really were at the expense of other products’ performance. I watched Wayne work through these roadblocks. He never lost his self respect, his faith or his compassion. It would have been easy, almost understandable, if he had blamed others for the problems he encountered and the battles he had to fight. He didn’t.

At the end of his tenure, Wayne’s managers decided he wasn’t the person they wanted to continue leading the product. They wanted a different approach. I was directed to relieve Wayne of his command, with the help of the chief operating officer. Wayne was traveling to my office for a meeting and I discussed with the COO how we would break the news of his firing to Wayne. We agreed that we respected him too much to make him travel all the way from Texas to the east coast to be fired and turned back around afterward. We reached him on his cellphone and told him the news. I said, “Wayne, you really don’t need to come here for a day so that we can fire you. Do you want to stay home and be with your family?”

Wayne responded, “Tony, thank you. I’m going to come to you. This is a difficult time and you and (the COO) may need me to help you through it.”

I’d say I was a bit taken aback by his words. We need him to help us through this!? He was the one being fired. But Wayne didn’t approach it that way. He knew we were anguished to have to do this and his concern was for us. The three of us met the next day and discussed the details. At the end of the termination meeting, Wayne asked us, “Are you fellas okay? I know this is hard on you guys and I want you to know I respect both of you. This doesn’t affect our friendship.” I thought I would be consoling him but it turned out Wayne was comforting me.

Being fired didn’t dim Wayne’s inner light. If anything, it shone more brightly. Wayne became a successful senior manager in a company in Texas, blessed to be able to work in a respectful environment that utilized his talents and to be close to his strong and faithful family, for which he gave thanks.

You and I choose how we live our lives. More properly, we make hundreds of small choices each day that add up to the sum of our lives. In baseball an inch either way means a hit or an out. In football an inch can mean first down or punt. Everything we need to help us make the right choices and go those inches in our journeys successfully, we already possess.

Our most important choice is how we are going to use all of the best within us to achieve and sustain success.

Lesson:

“There is a destiny that makes us sisters and brothers. None of us goes his way alone. All that we send into the lives of others comes back into our own.” Alicia Appleman-Jurman, Holocaust survivor and author of Alicia, My Story