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You Salute the Uniform Not the Person in It

August 18, 2020 by Oliver Cummings Leave a Comment

Rank Has Meaning in An Organization and Should Be Respected, But A Jerk in A Position Is Still a Jerk.

McFerrin was a tough old military nurse.  She was the supervising nurse at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital where my father worked for a time as an orderly. She expected everyone in her charge to work.

That was not a problem for Dad. He was accustomed to work and believed he owed his employer a full day’s work for a day’s pay.

At a point, the VA sent down a dictum that its employees were to dress in a military fashion on the job. To Dad that meant spit and polish and a crisp white uniform. To that end, he polished his shoes and belt regularly and wore fresh clothes every day.

One summer day, in the then non-air-conditioned wing of the hospital, he was cleaning out bathtubs. The place was hot, especially in the humidity of the bathing area.

As Dad told it, he was standing on his head cleaning a tub, was wringing wet with sweat, and was thinking about the way Mrs. McFerrin had, in his opinion, mistreated a coworker earlier in the day.

Sweat had soaked Dad’s shirt and run down across his belt, leaving black streaks on his white pants. Mrs. McFerrin happened to walk up behind him and began to “dress him down” for the condition of his uniform.

Dad took the assault without comment until Mrs. McFerrin came to a pause. Then he asked, “Are you finished, Ma’am?”

She snapped, “Yes.”

“Then, as of right now you have my two-week notice.” He said.

Two weeks later over protestations from hospital personnel, including Mrs. McFerrin, Dad was done with that job.

He never failed when talking about that to emphasize to me that when you do your job to best of your ability and follow organizational rules, you do not need to, in fact should not, allow yourself to be mistreated by anyone in the organization.

More than 20 years later, I found myself in a situation at work that harkened back to that lesson. I worked for a publishing company when the company moved one of its editorial operations from Boston, MA to Iowa City, IA. The move created several openings when people chose to leave the company rather than move to what they perceived as nowhere in the middle of the country.

I transferred from a regional office to a Senior Editor position. Ed, who would be my direct supervisor, was the only transferee from Boston. The new Department Director was from Iowa City and brought a lineup of his cronies into the newly formed department.

I had a pretty good time in the editorial job for a couple of years, got some great experience hiring and working with professional staff, and in working with a variety of high-powered authors.

There were a number of things that transpired over that couple of years, though, that made me happy to have Ed between the Director and me.

Then there came a December day, when I was called into the Director’s office along with Ed, to discuss a performance review I had given for a relatively new editor that reported to me. I had been very pleased with her productivity and with the accuracy of her work; and I had rated her relatively highly.

In the meeting, the Director told me he didn’t want to have ratings go in that were “too high” and he wanted me to change my rating of the editor.

I suggested that I had followed the personnel review directive from headquarters and was not inclined to change my evaluation.

As the discussion continued, Ed suggested that we submit two evaluations, one that represented my assessment and another that represented the Director’s. That solution was not acceptable to the Director and he said he was going to alter my evaluation before submitting it to headquarters.

The meeting ended under those terms and as we walked back to the suite of offices we shared, I asked Ed, “If I resign today will I get my bonus for the year?” His answer was that I would have to be employed at the end of the year to qualify. I said, “Then, I will wait until after the holidays.”  When I returned to work on January 3rd, I presented Ed with my resignation letter, giving 30-days notice.

I later accepted an extension, agreeing to work until the end of February. Some 26 years later that same company rehired me and gave me employment credit for those early years, much to the inconvenience of the personnel manager who dug through long-warehoused paper documents to verify that employment, but that is another story.

The Point of this Story.

It is easy for some people to take on the role of being trapped in a job. When a person in a position of authority abuses that position, fails to give you reasonable respect or demonstrates that they are not worthy of your respect, you need to think about what you will do.

Feeling that you have no alternative but to stand there and take it, is detrimental to your need to do first, what is right. That, in turn, is detrimental to the organization in which you go to work dispirited, and to the potential organization you would better contribute, but where you don’t work.

Filed Under: Leadership, Learn from the past, stories

Don’t be a Dapper Danny

August 2, 2020 by Oliver Cummings Leave a Comment

By Oliver Cummings

“Make hay while the sun shines” describes a farmer’s reality.

The sun came up hot on hay-bailing day and the dew was off the grass very early. By 8:00 I was throwing up wind rows of hay mown two days earlier and left to cure in the field. The side-delivery rake was just the right tool to pull behind the little red-belly Ford. Dad wasn’t far behind on the John Deere, pulling the bailer that produced 70-pound rectangular bales of alfalfa hay that would feed the cows and horses come winter. As the morning sun climbed the scent of the new mown hay gave way to the smell of dust kicked up by the raking and baling processes.

About 9:30, Johnnie and his hay-hauling crew pulled into the field. A couple of days later, we would move the whole operation to Johnnie’s farm to take in his hay crop, too.

Johnnie’s crew was his son, Jerry, just turned 17, Danny, one of Jerry’s high school buddies, and Bobby a 14-year old buddy of mine from school. All three were buff; strong. Jerry and Bobby, farm boys, a little rough around the edges. Danny was slicker, a town boy.

As they pulled into the field, Jerry and Danny dove off the wagon and started walking alongside the vehicle, now crawling along between two rows of bales. Jerry picked up a bale by the seagrass strings that bound it. He walked it to the wagon and heaved the bale up to Bobby, ready to start meticulously laying out the stack so the loaded wagon could move across the rough field without the load shifting. By the time Bobby got the bale positioned, Danny pitched the second bale on the wagon from the other side.

This ritual was repeated, with Bobby placing bale upon bale overlapping the so that one layer locked the next layer in place until they had five layers high and a tie-bale row down the middle, the length of the wagon.

Now they were thoroughly soaked with sweat, covered in hay dust, and ready to make the slow ride from the field to the barn, hoping for a breeze along the way. Johnnie turned the tractor over to Jerry to drive the half-mile to the barn for unloading and started walking home. He would be mowing the rest of the day on his own property a mile away.

The barn was a large central hallway flanked by stalls on either side. The hayloft was the second floor covering the main hallway and the internal stalls. It was cavernous today because last year’s hay crop had been almost totally fed out.

Jerry and Bobby climbed into the hayloft to carry back and stack the hay. Danny had volunteered to pitch up the bales from the wagon. With a light breeze at his back the outside work wasn’t too unpleasant. He would pitch a bale onto the hayloft floor; Jerry would hook it with the hay hook and drag it back to Bobby to stack. The hayloft was hot and stuffy.

All went well until the load was about two-thirds in the barn. Danny bucked a bale up and, more or less, pushed it into the door to the loft. With that, Jerry said, “Don’t strain yourself, Danny Boy.” Danny shot him a look and said, “Hey, I gotta go to the toilet.”

Jerry, short curly red hair glistening with sweat in the sunlight, jumped down onto the wagon and started bucking bales up for Bobby, now having to both drag back and stack. By the time Danny finished his toilet visit, the other boys had the wagon unloaded and were ready load number two. Danny trotted out to the road and jumped onto the wagon as they headed to the field. It was going on noon.

The second load went much as the first until half way through the unloading process, Danny got something in his eye and had to go to the house to see if Mom could get it out for him.

On the third load, it was a splinter in his finger that disabled poor old Danny, yet again.

Danny was a “goldbrick,” a slacker. Johnnie tolerated Danny on the crew because he was Jerry’s friend. But, when it came time for Dad to put a crew together to help Johnnie, Danny was not among those considered.

Goldbricks in Business

In the business world there are many ways that people exhibit slacking behavior.

Cyberslacking applies to employees who use company Internet connections and time for personal activities. However, there is a more subtle form of goldbricking in business that is a problem for managers and may result in personnel actions that the goldbricker may not expect.

As a young manager I hired a clearly talented person, I will call her Malinda, to evaluate training programs. In the first year she quickly became a good on-site evaluator.

I noticed, however, that on courses where she had some apparent investment (e.g., personal interest in the subject matter) she did a superior job. But, on assignments where she perceived the content to be boring, or the client to be “difficult,” her work output and the clients’ ratings of project quality were significantly degraded.

Over a period of three years Malinda’s performance was up and down, from excellent to below average.

I documented and discussed her performance on a project by project basis, summarized it during mid-year and annual reviews, and discussed it in career coaching sessions with her. The behaviors, however, persisted in a pattern that became predictable.

Toward the end of her third year, in spite of the negative feedback and coaching I had given her in the various venues, she apparently expected to be considered for a project lead position in the department. When I told her she would not be considered for the position, and that her performance was too inconsistent, she acted surprised and offended. Shortly thereafter she resigned, “to pursue other interests.”

The moral of the story.

Every employee needs to have some expertise that they are “known for.” This is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for being really successful in a career. To be successful on a job you must also be known as a steady performer, willing to take on every assignment with a clear intent to do it to the best of your ability.

Filed Under: Leadership, Learn from the past, stories, Uncategorized

If You Want to Fish in My Pond, Come by the House First

July 19, 2020 by Oliver Cummings 4 Comments

Oliver W. Cummings

Johnnie was as fine a neighbor as a guy could have. When I was a youngster and our families visited, swapped work, butchered hogs together. We also fished and went on the occasional fish fry together. Johnnie favored fishing with a seine, or hogging. I learned to hog fish (now sometimes called noodling) in what we called the creek (actually the Cache River) with the likes of Johnnie, Seedcorn (my dad), Edward and Terry. It was quite a crew: jockey-sized Johnnie, smart, but barely literate; Ed, a hefty, farm-boy-strong, young man; Terry, a church choir boy; Dad, a farmer, trader and all around self-sufficient man; and me, an early teen eager to be one of the men.

Going hogging was a process. We met at Johnnie’s house and filed into his garage to dress for the occasion. This involved some real get-ups. Johnny with his old overalls, patched over knees and a gallus held by a ten-penny nail punched through a pucker of cloth where a missing brass button had been, and old shoes tied with seagrass string for laces. Dad, dressed in a worn-out long-sleeved khaki shirt, old worn out work pants with a rope belt, and a hat he didn’t mind getting wet with the muddy creek water. The rest of us equally fashionably dressed.

We looked like a bunch of happy tramps going down the road. The two men in the cab of Johnnie’s recently-purchased used truck. In the back of the truck with us boys were a couple of tow sacks for carrying the fish that we expected to catch. Down the road, dust fogging up behind the truck we started off.

For most of the last mile leading up to the creek, the road was bordered on either side by fertile farm land supporting a full stand of corn. The humidity put a blue haze above the fields and the heat made the air shimmer. The cool water was going to feel good.

We pulled off the road at the bridge, parked a few yards off the road, and walked another hundred or so downstream to one of Johnnie’s favorite fishing holes. There we made our way over the levee and down to the water level. Then one by one we waded into the muddy water. The mud on the bottom of the creek tugged at our shoes as we waded carefully across, feeling our way with each step to make sure we didn’t step off into a deep hole. As we got distributed along the banks, Johnnie eased down into the water until all you could see of him was his head and one shoulder above the water. He felt along the bank and the fallen tree trunks in the creek. Finding a hollow fallen tree under water he felt into the hole, gently, slowly, touching the sides of the hollow as he explored it for the catfish that should be there.

We had been in the water just a few minutes, hadn’t even caught a fish yet when the farmer-landowner walked up over the levee, a double-barreled shotgun cradled in his left elbow, and his right forefinger on the trigger guard. Johnnie looked up and said, “Hello, Jack.” in a voice loud enough for all of us to hear. Dad waded back toward where Johnnie was standing waist deep in the creek and greeted Jack.

After a short exchange of pleasantries Jack said, “I didn’t know who you guys were, didn’t recognize the truck. I don’t want just anybody driving back here, so I came to check it out. Hope you catch a sack full of fish.” With that, he swatted at a horsefly that had lit on his shoulder, turned and walked off of the levee.

Dad said, “I guess we shoulda gone by the house before we came down here.”  Then we went back to fishing.

Some years later, I was the Director of a Research and Evaluation function at a major corporate university. My colleague, Pat, headed the Management Development group in the same organization. We both hired people with similar backgrounds; industrial/organizational psychologists, organizational development specialists, and instructional designers with program evaluation and other specialty skills.

I had recruited a very high performing young woman into an evaluator position and within a couple of years, she was being considered for promotion.

I got wind, from a third party, that she had talked to Pat. I decided to talk to Pat about it.

It was clear that the young manager candidate was interested in the broadening experience that Pat’s group could provide. Our company valued personnel development, movement across the organization was not unusual and I was certainly not going to stand in the way of her further development. Yet, I wanted to make a point with Pat, that I expected to be informed soon after the first contact and before she went forward with serious discussions about a transfer. In the course of the conversation we had, I related the story about the fishing trip and ended it with, “If you want to go fishing in my pond, just come by the house first.”

Pat has reminded me of that story more than once, since. It served to strengthen our communication and friendship with each other, and we did a number of successful joint projects over the years.

Moral of the Story: Having the kind of open communication that allows you and your colleagues to do what is right for the people in your organization in service to strengthening the organization overall should be considered to be a prime directive for all managers. And, how you behave in crossing boundaries in your organization will impact your reputation as a manager. You will likely be recognized as a developer of people if you talk to a person’s manager before inviting them to apply for a job in your group; if you fail to do that, you’ll more likely be known as a poacher.

Filed Under: Learn from the past, stories

Brighteyes’ Bad Business

July 13, 2020 by Oliver Cummings Leave a Comment

Another bit of wisdom not found in books

Oliver W. Cummings

The coronavirus pandemic has thrown millions out of work. Some jobs were stable throughout and some companies were and are hiring; some jobs lost will come back, some sooner, some later; and some jobs lost are gone, period. Whatever job you land eventually, there are still some fundamentals to which we all should pay attention.

The Lesson.

It was the 1930’s and hard times on the farm. Crops were not good; farm products were not selling for anything. Eggs were about 8 or 9 cents a dozen delivered to the Produce Company. Getting ahead or saving for the future was not even a question – just getting by was the issue.

One morning in the middle of the week, after the early morning chores were done, as the story was told to me, my dad appeared at the breakfast table dressed in his only, very old, suit, frayed white shirt and tie and his “good” shoes with a fresh coat of polish on them. When Mom looked at him with her most inquisitive look, he said simply, “I am going to get a job today.”  

He drove the eight miles to the nearest town of any size, Vienna, Illinois, and started looking for work. The third place he stopped was the local Buick dealership; they were looking for a salesman. Dad got the job, though he had never had a sales job before. He took the job seriously and for many months, in spite of the fact that the country was in a depression and almost all of the trade was in used cars, was a successful car salesman.

He worked with another salesman, a man called “Brighteyes” Miller, known for his sparkling blue eyes and glib manner. Almost everyone around home had a nickname – Dad’s was “Seedcorn,” but that is another story, and no, mine was not “Nubbin.”

Brighteyes was apparently one of those people that helped establish the used-car salesman stereotype.  More than once, Dad told of the customer that came back, after having bought a car from Brighteyes, and complained bitterly and long about the car he’d bought. The customer got no sympathy from Brighteyes.

The confrontation ended in an exchange in which the customer called Brighteyes a bastard, to which Brighteyes replied, “You can’t prove it.” 

The unsatisfied customer left in a huff and Dad observed that for the next twenty years, that dissatisfied customer drove Fords and Chryslers bought from local dealers, but never drove another Buick.

Listen to Dad

The sales job provided Dad and Mom the money they needed to get through a rough economic period and allowed them to save enough money to start a small produce store of their own. He told me this story many times in various circumstances and there were always three points to be made:

  1. If you are willing to work, you can always find a job. If you present yourself as confident and trustworthy, even if you aren’t the most experienced or sophisticated person around, people will appreciate doing business with you.
  2. You may need to be willing to accept a job that is not the job you wished for and/or where you would like it to be. If so, then make that job a steppingstone to your next one.
  3. You need to always do your job ethically and work with all people in an evenhanded manner, because not to do so can have very long-lasting negative effects.

Filed Under: Learn from the past, stories

Advice from the Old Sarge

July 12, 2020 by Bill Welter 6 Comments

A person standing on top of a dirt field Description automatically generated

I dropped out of college in 1966 and enlisted in the Marine Corps. Toward the end of my training I was asked by the company commander if I wanted to apply for Officer Candidate School. Since it was “only” going to add a couple of years to my enlistment I applied.

With some hard work (OCS was physically harder than boot camp, but not as tough psychologically) and luck, I made it through and was going to be commissioned. My mother, father, and fiancé (now my bride of almost 53 years) flew out to Virginia for the ceremony. My mom and Marge pinned on my shiny new bars and I was expecting a snappy salute from my dad, the old WWII Sarge.

He walked up to me and before he gave me his salute he reverted to “dad mode.” He poked his finger (hard) into my chest and said “Remember, your only job is to take care of your troops!” Then he gave me his salute.

That was the best leadership advice I ever received.

During these tough times I wish more executives had my dad around to remind them of their most important job.

Listen to the old Sarge, take care of your troops.

Filed Under: Leadership, stories

Philosophy, The Cosmos, and Terry Brown

July 6, 2020 by Oliver Cummings Leave a Comment

Another story about wisdom not found in books

By Oliver W. Cummings

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, universities around the world are rethinking how to best provide the university experience going forward. We saw basically everything go online in the second half of the spring 2020 semester. I think many schools will move much more online in coming years and there are many benefits to doing that. One thing that we need to figure out is how not to lose some of the important social aspects of a university education. To wit:

The Lesson

Terry Brown introduced me once as a metaphysician. I am not sure whether he referred to my desire to understand the nature of reality and the relation between mind and matter or to a less complementary comment on my reasoning powers (subtle and recondite), but I took it as a complement and hope, indeed it was. Even if he was thinking the latter, from him it was probably still a complement. Terry was not a particularly subtle man.

Mr. Brown, as we called him most of the time, was a graduate student friend of the third roommate in the house my high school buddy, Richard McKenzie, and I inhabited as our first apartment as freshmen at Southern Illinois University. Bill Middleton was our housemate and the three of us had half of Mrs. Ellis’ house. We shared two rooms and a bathroom. Mrs. Ellis lived alone in the other half of the house and we rarely saw her, except when rent came due.

Terry and Bill were both PhD candidates in English. Richard was destined to become a physicist and professor, and me, well I’ve had a pretty good career in education, corporate training, program evaluation, and related stuff.

Terry was a frequent visitor at the Washington Street house in Carbondale, IL. It was just a short walk down to the Italian Village, a place we frequented for Italian sausages and Italian beef sandwiches – health food for a bunch of college boys. A couple of blocks further on was Piper’s Steak House, an occasional Friday night place for us to splurge on ribeye steaks. I think it was a good thing for Richard and me to be hanging around with these PhD students.

We were given the opportunity to learn a lot from them.

One late fall evening Terry came over just as the sun was going down. Richard greeted him as he came into our room, which was in the front of the house-half that we rented. Bill had the back room, so his visitors were always greeted by a freshman doorman.

As Terry came in, Richard said, “Come in Mr. Brown. Sit down and tell us what you know.” Terry took a seat by the small table in our room, Richard took the other seat at the table, Bill brought in a chair from the back, and I sat down on the bottom bunk.

Mr. Brown then proceeded to begin to tell us what he knew.

We covered everything from the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to nuclear physics, and from the civil rights movement to the military-industrial complex. The discussion continued into the night, the coca cola was totally consumed, the ashtrays were all full and still Mr. Brown continued to tell us what he knew: the geography of the Kettle Moraine area of Wisconsin and how it was formed; the place of the solar system in the galaxy; how the Kennedy presidency would be remembered; the best and worst of American-made automobiles, and on it went.

The next morning, before any of us had to go to classes, we four walked down the street to a diner for breakfast and Terry continued to tell us what he knew.

Nights like these do not happen online.

Filed Under: Leadership, stories

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