Years ago I happened to be in the warehouse of the company where I worked. I was checking the count of some item because I didn’t trust the daily inventory report.
As the president of the company walked from his office to the offices on the other side of the building, I observed a long time, but low level employee approach the president, and ask him if he could get a paycheck instead of taking the week’s vacation he was scheduled to start in a couple of weeks. The employee said he needed the money more than he wanted the time off.
While it seemed reassuring that the president was approachable from employees, regardless of their place on the organizational chart, what took place as a result of that brief conversation was an occurrence that takes place all took often in entrepreneurial companies.
The employee did almost all the talking, ending his pitch in a question to the president. The president answered with a single word: “Sure.”
As I think back on it, the president wanted to help his employee. After all, it was the president’s company, and he should be able to make these kinds of decisions because he is the one who signs the paychecks.
I am also sure that this individual, like many others who own companies, wanted to be liked by those that they lead. One way to be liked is being able to solve these kinds of issues to the satisfaction of an employee when they are raised.
Being more of a task oriented employee, I was more focused about getting the actual count of the inventory than listening to conversations that didn’t concern me. Or so I thought at the time.
But it did concern me, and it should have been an issue for everyone in management at that company. The president, by uttering a single word, had breached the respect and authority level of every manager in his company. He broke his own policy his own company had instituted related to vacation time for every one of his employees.
The company had changed and grown from small business to a large enterprise over the years. The president, recognizing the need to add talent to the firm to maintain the growth, had hired professionals from the outside to help him bring systems, policies, procedures and compliance to governmental regulations.
While the company had changed and adapted, the president had not. He still wanted to be liked by his employees, which is not a bad thing. But the president did not comprehend or understand that it meant that he to give up control and decision making authority to his management team to enforce the very policies and procedures that had been created to prevent ad hoc decision making related to employee policies and procedures. These were policies and procedures that the president had reviewed and approved of at some point.
Because of the company had been successful, the number of employees the company had grown, and additional considerations were necessary to make certain that the company was in compliance with various local, state and federal regulations regarding employment practices. The president was vaguely aware of these things but lacked any specific knowledge of any of them.
In his quest to demonstrate he was still a nice person and still had the ability to make decisions, the president made an error.
What the president didn’t know is that the employee had already asked the question of his supervisor, who did not know what the policy was, but sought help from someone who did, the human resources manager. The request was reviewed and compared to the policy and the employee was told in no uncertain terms that he had to take the time off from work for his own health and well being and could not just take the pay and work.
What the employee did was to ask the president to break policy based on their personal relationship and to ignore what his supervisor had told him. The employee thought that he could get what he wanted by doing an end-around by taking his hard luck case directly to the president, his long term employer.
Why did the employee seek out the president? It was because of their long tenure working together and the employee was pretty sure that a personal appeal to his long time coworker and ultimate decision maker would not be turned down.
Why did the president violate the policy? Because he wanted to be a nice guy and demonstrate to that he could still make decisions; that he still was in charge.
In many firms, the management of the company would simply shake their heads and accept what the owner had done; knowing that in the actions of the president undermined their authority but still accepting a paycheck for a dysfunctional company that likely would not change for the better.
In this case, those managers involved stood by their decision, told the president he was not only wrong but out of line and in violation of his own approved policy. They suggested that the next time someone approached him with a request, to simply say “check with your supervisor.”
The employee took the vacation and was warned, in writing, not to go over his supervisor’s head again or he just might find himself on a permanent vacation without pay.
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