Someone asked my recently how work was going, and I replied “I’m not sure. I may have quit.” You may have quit? How can you not know for sure? Good question.
The company where I work has reviews for all employees every year in early December. This last year, as the review date approached, my manager’s manager’s manager laid down a new rule; new hardware allocations to teams would be held back until that team had completed all of their reviews. Seemed vaguely reasonable, he has had trouble getting some managers to complete their reviews in a timely fashion in the past, so here’s a bit of a carrot-and-stick approach to motivate them. At the time I didn’t think much of it, since I’ve always been rather diligent about writing reviews. I had eleven reviews to write (a new high) and my own self-evaluation, but as expected, I got them completed well ahead of other managers in the department. No worries.
Having finished my own reviews, I started looking for this new hardware that was to be available. Imagine my frustration when I was told the rule was more complicated than I first thought; reviews for the entire department had to be completed before hardware would be disbursed. That was more than a little annoying. Why was my team being punished because some other manager couldn’t get his/her act together to write reviews? Grrr… Still, not worth raising hell over; how long could it possibly take them?
About four months later, my team still didn’t have new hardware. And the lack of hardware was beginning to become a serious issue. I had one engineer who was using a three-year-old portable to do compiles when working at home on evenings or weekends. This meant a compile that took about 15 minutes at work was taking more like two hours at home. Additionally, I knew of a team that had recently changed departments, only to be immediately equipped with new hardware. Because of the excellent job they had been doing? No, merely because they reported to a department that had completed reviews. This policy was becoming increasingly frustrating and galling. So, I started working on challenging this rule.
I started bringing this topic up with my manager at our one-on-ones. He agreed it was a foolish policy, and assured me that the numerous warnings and complaints were registered when it was first introduced.But the VP in question (hereafter know as The Frenchman) persisted. Not long after, I had a one-on-one with my manager’s manager, where I brought up the same issue. I heard much the same from him; everyone complained when The Frenchman first brought up the rule, everyone thinks it’s a stupid rule, but we’re stuck with it. While it was nice to know I wasn’t the only one being frustrated, it didn’t really help fix the situation.
You might wonder why I wasn’t more frustrated with my manager and his manager since they hadn’t finished their reviews yet. While I was mildly annoyed with them for being such slackers, I resisted badgering them for two reasons. First, I resented being used as a “stick” by The Frenchman to batter other managers into submission. This rule was one of the dumbest things I had every heard, the hallmark of a massively inept manager. The last thing I wanted to do was perpetuate the cycle by motivating his managers where he could not. The other big reason was that i knew both of the managers in question. They were good people who genuinely did care about reviews and wanted to get them done, but were swamped with other, more critical tasks. And if someone is too busy to complete an essential task, who is to blame? Their manager. The Frenchman. Sigh.
After another week of fuming and frustration, I stayed late one Friday evening and wrote a long e-mail to The Frenchman. It was a good e-mail, by my standards. I wasn’t sarcastic or smartass, and I didn’t bait him. I simply asked if he could help me understand the policy. From my vantage point, it was causing morale problems on my team and in the department, it was slowing down work, and it clearly wasn’t doing much to motivate the laggard managers. I even suggested a number of alternatives for motivating the guilty parties. For my time and effort, I got a single-line response from The Frenchman, “Talk to your manager and your manager’s manager.” I can’t tell you how frustrated this response made me. Getting blown off did not sit well.
About a week after that, I got invited to my first-ever one-on-one with my HR rep. Coincidence? As she and I chatted about how things were going in the department, I brought this issue up. She quickly agreed with me that it was a stupid policy, was causing a lot of people grief unfairly, and that she had been part of the group who had tried to discourage the rule back in December. She promised to bring it up with The frenchman again, but at this stage I wasn’t terribly optimistic.
One weeks later, and still nothing had changed. Let’s see, I had talked with my manager, my manager’s manager, The Frenchman himself (and was blown off) and with my HR rep. Okay, the next stage would be to talk to The Frenchman’s boss. Again, I stayed late on a Friday evening and carefully crafted an email to the senior VP. Again, I was very cautious to phrase the email so that it was not accusatory, not confrontational, but simply asked for help understanding the rule, since I was seeing lots of negative effects from it, and no good effects. I was pleasantly surprised to get a response in short order. While he understood and supported the general goal of the rule (reviews are important after all, and anything we can do to get them done is a good thing), he appreciated my observations about the negative effects of the rule on morale and productivity. He offered to speak with The Frenchman about finding a middle-ground. All things considered, I was very happy with this response. Finally, someone who might be able to make some headway.
About a week later, all of the managers in the department got an email from The Frenchman. He was revising the rule about reviews and hardware to be less draconian. Now, each team simply had to have their own reviews completed in order to receive hardware. For those groups that had met that goal, please contact him ASAP with their “wish list”, Yay, progress! So, I replied with great haste, explaining that I had finished all reviews and my own self evaluation several months ago and listing the hardware I needed (a fairly modest list, all things considered). Almost immediately, I got a response from The Frenchman. My team still would not be receiving hardware, because all reviews for the team had to be completed, including my own review (which my manager had not done yet).
I snapped. I walked down to my manager’s office, found he wasn’t there, left my badge in his chair and walked out of the building. That was nine days ago.
More later.
Eek! This sounds very stressful. How are you feeling- are you getting support from the rest of the people in your team?
It’s the French. You can’t trust them. (Perhaps you had better call him the Freedomman, just to make that clear).
hope it calms down soon.