Winning - Jack Welch [107]
Which leads to a kind of organizational inertia.
Take the case of a man I know of whom I’ll call Lee, who ran a thirty-person division of an international communications company. Formerly a successful writer himself, Lee created a competitive, almost frantic, environment in the office, with the staff churning out more copy than divisions twice the size. At the same time, he held the team to extremely high standards of creativity, a major plus in the eyes of headquarters.
But Lee had a mean streak a mile wide. His humor could be cruel, and he particularly let loose on young, inexperienced employees. He also reveled in his intensely adversarial relationship with the division’s unionized employees, which poisoned the atmosphere for everyone.
Lee held his staff in a kind of terrorized thrall. Many people liked the prestige of working in his high-performing division, but they hated his day-to-day nastiness. Top performers often stayed for only a year or less, but Lee was protected by the industry’s laws of supply and demand. There was always another young, ambitious writer or artist ready to sign up.
And so, despite the constant turnover, the organization’s top management let Lee stay and stay—until he suffered a heart attack. After he was gone, one of his former employees said, “It took an act of God to get rid of him.”
Usually, a bad boss with great numbers doesn’t have to die for senior management to replace him, but it can take a cataclysmic event to provoke action.
Take “Karen,” a senior-level boss at a money management firm. Karen managed fifteen fund managers and their teams—about two hundred people combined. The company was known for its ruthless, hard-driving culture, and Karen epitomized it. She worked eighteen-hour days. She publicly denounced fund managers who underperformed, occasionally reducing people to tears in meetings, and routinely belittled the support staff, snidely referring to them as “the Danielle Steel fan club,” since many were middle-aged women who read popular novels during their lunch breaks. When Karen’s bosses were around, however, her persona became thoughtful and caring, earning her the nickname of Sybil, after a woman with multiple personality disorder who was the subject of a best-selling book.
For more than a decade, Karen’s money managers posted impressive results, significantly outperforming comparable funds. But when the Internet bubble burst, the cost of her management approach began to show. Fund managers were heavily invested in high-growth stocks to make their numbers and avoid Karen’s ire—in fact, their biggest holdings were in Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco.*
When Karen was fired, senior managers made a big show of denouncing her management style. Many of her people shook their heads in amazement—it had been in evidence for years, but it took a disaster to make management confront it.
You may not work at a company that lets a bad boss hang around until a mess erupts. But it’s possible great numbers will keep your bad boss around indefinitely.
If you feel that’s the case, your next question should be:
What will happen to me if I deliver results and endure my bad boss? If you think that your organization, and in particular your boss’s boss or someone in HR, understands your bind and sympathizes, you should feel pretty confident that eventually you will be moved up or sideways as a reward for surviving. While you’re waiting, hang in there and give the job your all.
I was fortunate to have many great bosses during my career. They encouraged me, protected me, built my self-confidence, and gave me challenges that stretched my abilities. Reuben Gutoff, my boss for more than a decade when I was starting out, did all these. He kept the mammoth bureaucracy of GE off my back while I learned real-time how to build a business from scratch. I was able to travel the world in my twenties, setting up joint ventures and making small acquisitions.
It took seventeen