Читать книгу Organization Development - Donald L. Anderson - Страница 31

“You wanted a specific example, so I found one that illustrates a common scenario,” Beth explained. “I’m sure he’s told you about the initiatives that he assigned us to. Well, we have weekly project reviews to share our progress on each initiative. I’m one of the team leads for Supplier Quality, but I also have six suppliers of my own to manage on a regular basis outside of the initiative. Last week we had an initiative review with Jared, but there honestly wasn’t much to share. One of my suppliers had a huge problem that required me to spend the entire week sorting out why they were not able to get us enough products in time for us to make our customer shipments. Customers have to be our top priority. I had no time to spend on the initiative since I was prioritizing my time on the supplier problem. So in this week’s review, I told Jared that we didn’t make as much progress as I would have liked. His first response was, ‘What have you been doing all week? I wish I had that much free time,’ and then immediately sent an e-mail to the entire team that read, ‘Beth obviously needs help on her project since she was unable to make any progress this week. Please volunteer to help her immediately.’ There was no recognition that I was doing other critical work, and it was offensive to point me out in front of my peers like that.”

“I’m sure you’ve heard about our first employee meeting with Jared,” Luke pointed out. “He told us how he looks at employee performance. He told us, ‘You need to set yourself apart from the others if you want to succeed around here.’ That’s a direct quote. Then he took a few people out to lunch when we had all helped them succeed, so we quickly learned that it wasn’t worth helping out our peers. It’s hard to get a raise or a promotion in this company, so everybody has started competing with each other a little. You have to be on Jared’s good side. If you’re one of his favorites, it is clear that you’ll be taken care of.”

“You asked me if I have ever given Jared direct feedback,” Mia said. “The answer is yes. Let me tell you how that went. I lead the team initiative on reporting where we are trying to organize a standard set of supplier reports so everyone has access to accurate data on a weekly basis. In one of our meetings, Jared said that he wanted to have a dashboard display different data than what we were planning. In fact, he was proposing changing the standard calculations that we have used for years. What he was proposing didn’t make any sense, and no one spoke up. In my next one on one with him, he asked me if I had any feedback for him about how the project was going, so I told him. I said that his calculations could cause us a lot of problems. He immediately got defensive and told me that he was in charge and that if I didn’t like that I could find a job somewhere else. I learned that whatever Jared says is the right answer. It’s just not worth it to argue with him.”

“Our team meetings? I would say that they are like going to the principal’s office,” Nick said. “Initially we just acted like we did with Brad. Everyone spoke up, and we had free-flowing discussions. But then Jared started getting really serious. He brought charts showing how poorly we were performing as a team, and he started calling out certain people by name who he felt weren’t performing up to his expectations. A bunch of us think that is ironic considering how we are more productive as a team than we have ever been. It just got really negative, and we all feel like we’re a bunch of losers who can’t get anything done. Now we just all stare down at our papers and take notes.”

“I’ll tell you what happens when we try to be resourceful and innovative,” Olivia said. “I am on the initiative team that is redesigning our new product supplier process. Basically this is how we start to work with new suppliers for our newest products. Our team had the idea to start participating in some of the marketing product meetings so that we would have advance notice of any new work coming to our group. If we had one person responsible for monitoring new products, we could get ahead of the curve and plan our work more accurately. We went to the head of marketing and got invited to the next meeting. At the meeting, everyone was really enthusiastic about this partnership and we all agreed it would be a huge time saver for everyone. Well, I was really proud of what we had done, and I made the mistake of telling Jared about this hugely successful meeting with marketing. His first statement to me was, ‘Who told you to do that?’ in a really angry tone. I said that it was part of our initiative, and he just cut me off and told me that any meetings outside our group needed to be authorized by him first.”

“I’ll show you an example of one of the ways that he is always slighting us or getting a dig in,” Nadia said as she pulled up an e-mail on her computer. “Just a week ago I finished conducting a supplier review that was a real headache to pull off and somehow Jared found out about it. He sent this e-mail on Monday and copied everyone on our team. It’s short, so I’ll read it to you. ‘Everyone, Nadia has finally completed a supplier review and did an excellent job in uncovering major errors. This is why I insist on accurate metrics.’ Who would send a message like that? First, what does he mean by ‘finally completed’? Is he saying it took me too long or something? And then he adds his point about metrics, which is a clear insult to me because he mentioned one of my errors in a staff meeting last month. He didn’t mention my name then, but I’m sure everyone knows. These kinds of comments are really demoralizing. You can’t trust anything he says.”