"As soon as you have made a thought, laugh at it."
— Lao Tzu
The decade that had past since Frank's lesson about working with jerks (see Entry #3) felt like an eternity. I'd moved six timezones west, and gone to work within a different government agency. I'd gotten burned out on pure hands-on technical work, and had shifted into project management. I'd moved again to do crisis management for a major vendor of computer hardware and software on the West Coast. All the while, I was becoming increasingly annoyed with abusive "management" and "leadership" practices directed toward my peers and me. I wanted to protect and grow the fine humans I worked with, so it was inevitable that I would decide to make the shift into people management, and had done so, at the computer vendor.
I'd attended their leadership and new-manager courses. On Wednesday of the first week-long management class, the instructor looked at me during a coffee break and said, "You just get this stuff. You should have gone straight into the advanced class." That might have been true, but even the advanced class only made passing reference to managing difficult employees. Roughly: "Some employees who misbehave might require you to be mean." So, I was wholly unprepared for the first two jerk situations I would come up against.
I'd been directing my team of five backline software support engineers to create and deliver technical training and proactive support to major customer accounts, so that their coders would know best practices for our products. These customers had someone to call for guidance, so they would rarely end up on our phone with a significant problem, and they experienced our support as a partnership (instead of the barely responsive, "we have your money" support model that many vendors provide). This was all going swimmingly, but we still had a steady stream of support cases coming from smaller customers that we couldn't economically train.
Four of my five guys were completely adequate. Some of them were rock stars: voracious, analytical problem-solving machines; most with big hearts to boot. Then there was the fifth guy. He was a card-carrying, awesome-signaling Mensa member. He was a perfectionist. He never finished anything on time. Our team could not count on him to support our customers. All that said, he was not really a jerk — he was collegial under normal circumstances — and he definitely had skills, just not in our group's core function.
Since his strengths lay elsewhere, I'd approved a months-long, part-time research project for him, working with one of the academic legends in the sales and marketing org. They'd pioneered a new computational method, and I was glad when their work scored my guy a publication success, and visibility across our corporate subculture.
Nonetheless, because of his continuous failures in the support function, I'd had to put him on a performance plan. I'd made it softball-laden, because I just wanted a reason to keep him long enough for him to find other work. During the plan, he'd continued to underperform and run late, on every deliverable. Seeing the writing on the wall, I'd scoured the subculture, searching for better-fitting opportunities. (He made no efforts on his own behalf, nor followed up on anything I found.) Even the legend, with whom he'd just published, was not interested.
His final deliverable for the plan was a presentation to our team of performance testing results. He hadn't completed the work; without notification of any kind, he was a no-show. During the next team meeting, his face shape-shifted as he sat next to me and erupted, yelling about how he expected to be gone imminently, "because of the new manager who wants to put a notch in her belt." Given my efforts, I was blindsided by his accusation. I sat in stunned silence — a few seconds that felt like forever — then got the meeting back on track.
I ended up giving him a final warning, but not terminating him at that time: a colleague had called solely to allude to his being suicidal; I also knew he was a single dad, with an only child who was ready to head off to college. I still hoped he could find other work. Soon enough, though, the next round of dot-com-bust layoffs arrived, and he had to go. I was on travel the day of the layoffs, so my director terminated him. I felt relieved at the time — I had no idea how to do it, and was mortified — but I now feel deprived of the experience.
What I've realized since the time of my perfectionist's termination is that my desire to coach, and my routinely consensus-building management style, effectively program me to feel like I need to explain myself. In the case of termination, though, no such need exists: the action, by its nature, implies the justification. Here's how I'd do it: "Ron, we no longer need your services. Here's your separation package; it contains the number for personnel, whom you can call to arrange insurance and your other benefits. Thank you, and best wishes." (Hat tip to Brad Pitt as Oakland A's general manager, Billy Beane, in Michael Lewis' Moneyball; highly recommend, for this and other management gems.)
One jerk down; one much bigger one to go.
Prior to Mensa Guy's firing, I'd picked up another team of seven support engineers for a high-performance file-system product, so I had a total of eleven people to grow and protect. My file-system guys were the sole possessors of production-operations administration expertise for the product, short of the developers themselves. This product was complicated, and provided public- and private-sector customers around the world with infinitely many ways to screw themselves in a mission-critical function. This meant that sales teams in Europe and Asia were demanding that my guys — who sat in the US Midwest — should attend customer calls, in their timezones. We were being eaten alive; I had to be on all those calls, to defend against more unreasonable requests.
My original team of four all knew what they were doing. Of the four, the least capable was still good, but he'd long exhibited jerk tendencies. During the years he'd worked under prior managers, I'd personally witnessed him on several occasions taking credit for his teammates' solutions. (His prior managers were disengaged and oblivious to the falsity of his claims.) Having observed him extensively, I'd also surmised that he came from a culture that dictated that women shall not be placed in positions of authority over men. Yet there I was.
I got a request from a sales team in France for one of this team to come to Paris for the month of April, to teach every course we'd created, to a large group of customers. Coincidentally, my jerk spoke fluent French. He pushed back on being gone that long, but then agreed to the gig. I approved his travel plan for the four weeks the sales team had requested.
During his absence, I was drinking from the firehose with my file-system team. No news from Paris seemed like good news. The Monday he was supposed to return to the office, he did not. Neither did he contact me to explain his absence. I wrote it off to his needing more time to recover from jet lag. Tuesday, no contact; starting to worry. Wednesday, silence. I was concerned and pissed off at his lack of contact, and started losing sleep. Why? I interpreted his lack of communication as a challenge to my authority.
Thursday morning, nada. I asked his teammates if anyone had heard from him, or knew where he was. One of them admitted they all knew he was taking the week to travel to his homeland. As the only woman member of the team — and a late-comer who had been promoted over him — I inferred that he'd excluded me from his communication because of my gender, in an effort to humiliate me. I couldn't imagine him doing that to my male predecessors.
He was insubordinate, and given my beliefs about why, this situation was the biggest ego challenge I'd faced. Because he had excluded me, I found it impossible to summon the loyal perspective that he was my jerk (see Entry #3). My rage was nuclear, yet I remained cognizant that he had a rare skill set, and was productive enough that I wanted to retain him, if only to keep the pressure off my other guys. That afternoon, I called his home and left a concerned message, asking where he was, and if he was okay. (I'm not proud to admit that I did this partly to ensure that his wife knew that her husband was being a jackass.) Given my radioactive state, that was the only response I could come up with, that I could perform without losing my cool.
There was deep stuff going on in me. He had revealed to me my powerlessness over him, even though I nominally held the position of power. I felt like he had won by upsetting me. I later wished that I'd had the objectivity to see my anger for what it was — a valuable signal — and had immediately seized the opportunity to identify and address my emotional trigger, and then move beyond it, to explore all my options as a manager.
Instead, I rationalized not documenting his actions to my director or to HR, because I didn't want to fire him. I also recognized that my assumptions about his motivations were tenuous and potentially quite destructive; I was afraid the higher-ups would see me as unfit for management. Indeed, I arguably was, for that situation: I had no game with which to respond.
A couple months later, I had not transcended that hamstrung mindset, when it came time for his performance review. I documented his accomplishments for the year. Because I had not reported his insubordination initially, it seemed too late. I let it slide, except that I tried to ding him on his raise. HR compelled me to increase it to the corporate average. What? They can do that? (Refer back to HR being evil; see Entry #1.) This was unfair to the rest of the team, who were more productive and collaborative; their raises all took a hit, in order to bring his up. Outside of work, I was unaccustomed to feeling impotent. Yet there I was, and I felt guilty about it.
In the two decades since Insubordinate Guy, what have I learned? Upon reflection, I concluded that he touched the raw nerve of my older brothers' physical domination over me in childhood. I need to mentally prepare myself for jerks, because it all comes down to how I will respond. Will I become angry and lose sleep over their offenses? That would only harm me. In retrospect, the best attitude for me to have adopted would have been to reject my interpretation that he was challenging my authority, that gender had anything to do with it, and that any of that mattered. The fact is, I'm not a mind reader; I still don't know what his motivations were, and it didn't matter. I know that it didn't help me to believe those things: my choosing to hold onto those beliefs — not his motivations or actions, per se — ceded my power, and started a chain reaction that caused me to feel like a victim, to stay outraged, and lose sleep.
A key practice of Stoic philosophy is distinguishing between experiences, and our subsequent interpretations of them. The very essence of I is my ability to stop and consciously understand that my interpretation of an experience might be erroneous — that I in fact know nothing — and to choose an enlightened response. What if I had accepted my lack of control, laughed at my anger — and his negligence, disregarding his motivation — and simply reported it to HR? I would have had a basis for any salary or employment action, and it would have been fair to the team.
I have also integrated the practice of regularly monitoring my breathing to detect ego challenges or other stress reactions. When I experience one, I work to slow my breath, name the feelings, identify causes, and meditate on something like, "I want inner peace; I choose my response." I take a minute to cognitively reframe the situation to find its benefits, and make time later for inner-child regression work, to rescue myself from any unresolved traumas.
As for critiquing insubordination, I've realized the applicability of an approach I learned while training to be a scuba instructor, called the "praise sandwich." Its structure is praise-problem-praise-solution-praise. An abridged version of praise-problem-solution-praise is effective for work situations; for our example: "We've received excellent feedback from the sales team: they and the customers appreciated the training, and loved that you taught everything in French. One area where you can still improve is in your interactions with me: you needed my approval for time off beyond the class schedule. Next time, just ask. I'll be happy to approve your vacation days if I possibly can, but I need to know. Again, thanks for representing our team well, and for making the trip." This structure would have gotten the point across, while leaving his enthusiasm for the work intact.
This approach aligns with the Stoics' admonition to replace anger with love. The abridged version also captures the gist of Dialectical Behavior Therapy's DEAR MAN method, when requesting a behavioral change from someone, to: (1) give their motivations the benefit of the doubt; (2) state your experience as the recipient of their actions; and (3) state what you would prefer they do or say instead, which I follow up as appropriate with (4) gratitude for engaging in goodwill to hear and address my needs. (It's crucially important to pursue this dialog as soon as I recognize a problem, to avoid resentment and wasted time. I call this the "no festering rule.")
I hope you'll join me for the next entry, On Working for Jerks. We'll explore other adaptive techniques to prepare for and deal with the unfortunate individuals who pass through and — sometimes, temporarily — have major influence in our lives.
"We suffer more often in imagination than in reality."
— Seneca
You deserve another bonus poem (actually, a haiku trio).