Management by Retaliation

September 21, 2015

There are many ways to manage people.  Some managers are team builders, while others are teachers. A few managers go strictly by the book, while others apparently have never read the book.

Recently, I had a conversation with an employee who was working at a well-known big-box retailer.  She’d only been working there about eight months, but had begun to settle into her new job.  She seemed to be a hard-working and conscientious employee.  She shows up on time and works hard to master all the duties of her new job.  She watched all the training videos diligently and has tried to incorporate all their guidance into her daily routines.

Since she works in the snack bar, safe handling of food is a critical component of her job.  Here’s the problem, she needs to deal with the reality of the job versus what she was shown in the training videos. She learned there’s a prescribed method for defrosting frozen chicken.   She’s been shown the correct way, an yet her direct supervisor instructed her to simply defrosted chicken by placing it on top of the warm ovens so that it will thaw faster.  As we all know, this is a recipe for disaster and a sure way to make somebody sick or worse.

When her supervisor insisted she take this shortcut, she took it upon herself to go up the chain of command and bring it to the attention of his boss.  Instead of being grateful, that the store had a had a hard-working employee who was looking out for the best interests of their customers and the company, the senior manager simply brushed her off and sent her back to work.

Once her immediate supervisor was told she had gone over his head, he retaliated by taking her off of the morning shifts, cutting back her hours and generally making her life miserable.  These kinds of tricks are not new to seasoned managers who want to rid themselves of employees they don’t particularly care for.

This is a difficult lesson to learn for someone who’s just getting started building their career.  She naïvely thought that doing her job to the best of her ability would be a guaranteed path for success.  What she didn’t realize was that some of the people who are running the show have different motives.  They may simply want to meet goals set by management and are willing to take the path of least resistance and potentially endangering coworkers and customers around them.

Unfortunately, for this new employee, the lesson learned was to keep her head down and to do as she was told.  Worse yet, other employees may have also learned the same lesson and instead of building a team striving for maximum performance, this department supervisor has damaged and possibly demoralized the team and in the end settling for status quo – even when that status quo may send someone to the hospital.  The eager new employee may also have learned that being young can mean  you will discounted by management and treated not as an asset, but rather a nuisance that should be ignored.

Unfortunately, vindictive and petty management styles simply guarantee that an operation will go nowhere, much like a car perpetually stuck in neutral.  It also does damage to the employer-employee relationship when a potentially great employee is discouraged early on and begins to lose the enthuasim we want to see in them.  With a bad manager, employees will come but will quickly go.  Because it won’t take long to find out that their manager doesn’t have their back.

It’s too easy to see that the potential for a positive outcome can easily from come from situations like these.  Good, thoughtful managers can teach each member to be a proactive employee and problem solver and be rewarded for doing a job better or more safely.  A conscientious employee should be encouraged rather than discouraged.

More importantly, a potentially first-rate employee will be solidly on board your team, rather than searching Internet job boards looking for an employer who will treat them with respect.

Steve White is a writer and entrepreneur living and writing in Denver