Mean e-streaks in the workplace
Why are so many so mean in today's workplace? The answer may surprise you.
Garrett Wasny, CMC | November, 2000Why are so many people in today's workplace - especially those in senior and middle- management positions - so mean-spirited, so ruthless, so totally disingenuous? Exhibit A: I recently worked at a large multinational firm everyone knows. A senior executive there – a decent, hard-working, well-liked guy -- left for a three-month leave to serve as no less than the president of the local chamber of commerce. In his absence, his fellow executives promised to take care of his clients. That they did. When the executive returned and asked for his clients back, his former colleagues just laughed. They now had his clients, and no longer needed him. He was fired on the spot. The last time I saw this man, he was walking around in a depressive daze in a downtown shopping mall. Exhibit B: A top-notch female colleague I knew – incredibly bright and a dedicated team-player – goes on maternity leave. Although she is promised a job when she returns, none is waiting for her on her first day back. After a screaming match with her supervisor, she is shown the door and never returns. The last time I saw her, she was running wildly towards her car, sobbing hysterically. Exhibit C: A brilliant, top-performing Director I knew – a man responsible for 40% of the organization’s sales with only five percent of the sales staff – was terminated by a recently-arrived Senior Vice-President. The rationale: During a meeting, the Director had the gaul to ask the Senior Vice-president – who was a bona-fide, certified, deep-fried head-case -- a question about one of her papal edicts. That’s it, I swear. A simple question lead to his immediate dismissal. The last time I talked to him, he had moved across country. He was bouncing around from job to job, and still struggled, many months after the fact, to come to grips with what happened and why he was given the boot.
Welcome to Corporate North America, land of the wireless worker, and home of countless heart-breaking, caboose-kicking, career-decimating stories just like these. When I first entered the labor force in the mid-1980s, this type of corporate skullduggery was generally the exception, at least at the places where I worked. Office politics – the inane science and pathetic art of ego-stroking, boot-licking, favor-trading, trash-talking, finger-pointing, rumor-mongering, and back-stabbing to get something done, or, more frequently, to stop something from being done, accounted for, maybe, 10 percent of my time. Since then, it’s skyrocketed like Sputnik. Now – in late 2000 – it’s more like 70%, maybe higher. At least two-thirds of my time at least is spent not on things like serving customers, helping clientele, and doing real work. No, silly. It’s dedicated to more important stuff. Things like fighting over what and what are not appropriate agenda items for two-day meetings at which nothing of any real substance is discussed, and results in only the scheduling of more meetings. Things like writing ever more and thicker reports on minutiae (Exactly how many slides were in that Powerpoint presentation? 16 or 17?) for supervisors whose only mission is to pump out as much paper as possible in a vain effort to impress their bosses, who couldn’t care less. Things like agonizing over what to say, how to say it, and who you have to say it to – in precisely the right order – so as to not hurt the feelings, raise the ire, or trigger a formal written grievance from a colleague - for even the most trivial of tasks, such as who should make a telephone call to a colleague at the same level in another office. In this hyper-sensitive, common-sense-deprived environment, the rat-race has exponentially intensified. In my experience at least, white-collar cutthroats abound, pettiness contaminates virtually every interaction and transaction, and the rats almost always win. The old saying, “nice guys finish last”, no longer applies. Nice guys don’t finish, period. Increasingly outnumbered and outgunned, they’re clobbered from behind mid-race by a rabid mob of attack-managers, tossed face-first into unemployment, and left to rot in a shallow pool of their own outdated principles of honesty and compassion.
Why the sharp upturn in workplace nastiness and narcissism? While you could point your finger at many variables, everything from the breakdown of the nuclear family to the glut of mayhem and incivility in popular culture, I think a key cause is something more fundamental, genetic even. It’s fear. Yes, good old-fashioned terror, that gut-wrenching emotion which all humans, from the earliest club-swinging caveman to the latest stock-scamming Internet gazillionaire, share. What do people most fear? Not the bogeyman, the taxman, or Darva Conger, as horrifying as these are. Nope. It’s e-business. Yessiree, Bob. The dirty little secret of e-commerce is that entire sectors of the old economy will be wiped out. Gonzo. Kaput.
If you believe current estimates, a company going online can reasonably expect to achieve savings of 18-45% through quicker ordering of supplies, speedier delivery of goods, fewer errors, and other benefits. Impressive, yes, but exactly where will these savings come from? While no doubt e-commerce is creating untold new opportunities and jobs, try telling that to the 48-year-old dock worker – a guy with a mortgage, two kids in college, and two parents on pricey medication – that he has been officially “disintermediated” by the Internet, and his services are no longer required. Get used to it. In the coming years, there’ll be hundreds of thousands – maybe millions – of such workers in a wide variety of industries who will be laid off and left in the digital dust as a direct result of e-commerce. While much of the e-economy hysteria and feeding frenzy has virtually ignored this coming e-shakeout, I believe much of the workforce – especially senior executives and middle managers – instinctively know that the day of e-reckoning is coming. They may be incredibly petty and infantile, but they’re not stupid. Subciously or otherwise, they are living their professional lives in quiet e-desperation, and have aching doubts about their own future in an unforgiving digital marketplace in which one website started by some goatee-wearing college kid can revolutionize an entire industry, and make their own jobs redundant with a click of a mouse. Even in a booming economy, all this is manifesting itself in rising stress levels, higher blood pressures, and shorter tempers across the board. It’s contributing, in no small measure, to a win-at-any-cost, every-dogface-for-himself-and-herself, and I-wouldn’t-give-you-a-drink-of-water-even-if- you-were-dying-of-thirst mentality that is spreading throughout our corporate culture like some toxic airborne pollutant. Welcome to the 21st century.
Based in Vancouver, Canada, Garrett Wasny, CMC, is an e-commerce trainer and author. His latest book is World Business Resources.com. Mr. Wasny may be reached at gwasny@direct.ca or Tel: 604/878-4555.
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