MEAN TO ME
When Colonel #2 retired from his
position, Director, Operations Services, SRP posted this vacancy. I joined nine other
employees bidding for the job. The selection would be based upon the results of
a personnel development screening test called the In Box, said to be predictive of one’s managerial decision-making
skills.
The test lasted three hours. The task:
Sort through a packet of documents left behind when an executive dies
unexpectedly, and outline a plan of action based upon what you gleaned from
them. I flunked this test.
One
candidate, a power plant manager, excelled. He saw the solution immediately:
Sort the documents by date. Colonel #1 promoted him and lectured me.
“Your incredibly low score makes me
question your ability to serve as a department manager.” My knees buckled. I
had every reason to believe my days as the manager of the Supply Department
were numbered.
I
did not know my new boss, a long-time employee of SRP , known for one great act of heroism.
Years earlier, a winter rain storm battered the area and threatened the
integrity of SRP ’s dams. He and another man sailed a
small boat across a reservoir in the teeth of the storm to help rescue
employees trapped in Roosevelt Dam. Despite his reputation as a brave man, his
staff did not care for him. When news came of his promotion, they threw a party
without inviting him.
From
the outset, I did not get along with my new boss. Over the next four years, he
drove me nuts. He resorted to using insidious and devious means to obtain
information about employees and their work activities. Then he would spring his
findings on me as if to say, “I got you this time.” Unfortunately, there were a
number of employees whose job performance allowed him to make the case that my
management skills were lacking.
He employed our in-house security forces
to observe some warehouse employees whom he thought were purchasing drugs from
a man who operated a mobile food service truck, the proverbial Roach Coach. His
decision to resort to such secretive practices sickened me.
Angry
and frustrated, my spirits sagged. Nothing seemed to go right for me when
dealing with him. My management style, if indeed one could say I had one,
certainly did not mesh with his.
We
argued over my recommendations for annual pay raises. He did not agree with my
prior decisions. He used various statistics to prove favoritism on my part. He
claimed the disparity he saw among members of the forty salaried employees in
the Supply Department proved his point. He devised a complicated but logical
method of allocating funds for the upcoming round of pay raises which would
help to correct the imbalance he believed existed.
His salary adjustment plan could be
expressed as an algorithm. A sympathetic Systems Analyst friend secretly wrote
a Lotus 1-2-3
software program to satisfy it. It turned out to be the largest such program
the company had devised. It worked to perfection. Once I input the data, out
popped the recommended raises that satisfied his plan.
A series of medical emergencies
heightened my state of depression and brought about more conflict with my boss.
I had promoted one of my best pals to fill the position of Purchasing Agent a
year prior to his planned retirement. When he did, I replaced him with another
old pal of mine. Within a year, the retiree suffered a heart attack, and although
he survived, he lived out his life as a recluse. His replacement then suffered
a heart attack at work and died at the hospital. No one in the office knew how
to administer CPR. This infuriated my boss who blamed me for this lack of
training. He installed oxygen tanks at numerous work sites under his control,
thinking this would be of value in such emergencies, but had to remove them all
when our Safety Department told executives they posed a great danger to
employees. Apparently, using oxygen in emergency conditions requires even more
training than CPR and could pose even greater health risks to all involved if
administered improperly.
My boss insisted we hire someone outside
the company to fill the vacant Purchasing Agent’s job. This decision greatly
upset the supervisor of Material Control who craved the job. Imagine my shock
when this long-time employee suffered a fatal heart attack at home on August
9, 1986 .
I could not fathom why three of my
closest working companions had been stricken by heart failure in so short a
time.
Not surprisingly, my boss gave me
terrible performance review ratings three years running, with virtually no
increase in pay. Nearing my fifty-ninth birthday, my future with SRP seemed dismal.
In
1986, my boss relieved me of my position as Manager, Supply Department. I had
served in this capacity for 17 years. His special assistant attended the
meeting to take notes, eager to write down my confrontational outburst, cries
of injustice, whines of pity. I said nothing.
I expected him to fire me. He had ample
justification. I could not mesh with his mean-spirited style of management. He
chose to remove me from my position. I remained with SRP in a job created for me by upper level
executives. With their help, my working days ended on a happy note.
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