Courage

There was a time, and you have to be old to remember it, when a company was a team working toward a goal. There was a time when all shared the effort and all shared the results. Wow, have times changed. As management bemoans the fact that employees are no longer dedicated to the company, all they have to do is look in the mirror to see the reason.

We've covered a lot of ground in examining the aberrant behavior of people warped by the experience of management and one overwhelmingly dominant characteristic is that of projection. Projection is a term used in psychological research to describe the situation where a person, consciously or unconsciously 'projects' what they believe onto another person or persons. Racial or other prejudice is one such example. You see a lot of it when liberals brand those who don't think like them (and that's a whole subject of deviant psychology) as uncaring, hate-mongers, etc. The clearest example is someone who hates another person 'because he/she hates me.' In other words, a person justifies bad behavior by turning around and blaming it on someone else.

You can see now where management, especially upper management gets a lot of it's ideas. And a lot of projection gets mixed in with lack of trust. Most management realizes it can't trust itself (think Sarbanes/Oxley), projects it onto the workforce. That is why feces occurs.

One of the clearest examples of how wrong management thinking can go wrong is, surprisingly enough, snow. Or rather, plant closings due to snow.

I went to a college that subscribed to the co-op plan, where you went to school half the year and the other half you worked in your chosen field. This particular winter quarter I was working at the company that I would eventually join when I graduated.

We arrived that day at work to a snow storm and the snow continued to fall. Management made the right decision and sent everyone home at 11 am. By that time the parking lot was so bad, that we were pushing cars out of snowbanks to get them moving. Leaving that day was a physically arduous task. HOWEVER, by 1 pm, the snow stopped, the sun came out and began melting the snow. By the next day, the snow was gone.

Need I ask you to guess what happened next? Yep, management never, ever again sent people home 'officially' due to bad weather. And I mean NEVER. You would think that they'd have some compassion on their employees and open later. But...no. They'd been burned once. They had lost a half-day of productivity and they weren't going to lose that again! Yes, it is as ridiculous as it sounds. These days management has come up with an explanation for their policy that abdicates all responsibility from them and adds a tool to their arsenal of punishment against their employees: They tell their employees to use their judgment on whether to come in or not.

Think about it! Now management doesn't have to make any decision on bad weather, and if some employees take personal time to take a half-day or day off due to fears about the weather, they can use that against them at their reviews! It's a management Win-Win! First, they don't have to do their job by making a decision, then they can use the results to reduce costs. That is good business!

All hyperbole aside, this is management at it's shoddiest. They hold the threat of low/no raise over a person's head so that they have to drive through some of the worst conditions, risking injury, damage or life just so that they don't have to possibly be wrong. In plain words, it's cowardice.

The current place that I work has a 'snow phone' that we can call to see if the plant is open or closed due to weather. Since I've worked there, over 8 years, the message has never, NEVER, changed. We are always open for business as usual. This past week we had a 29 inch blizzard. The message did not change.

Stupid cowards.