In the brief interlude since my last post, we have had a few things happen. If you don't recall from reading the back catalog, my present place of employment is a small start-up. Our HQ is in a metropolis far, far away, and the company lab that is supposed to support our plant is far, far away in another metropolis far, far away from HQ. One reason. Greed. Basically, one founder wanted to live one place and the other founder wanted to live in the other place. Neither was the CEO. One wanted to build a company. One wanted to get rich. Neither will get what they wanted.
I wrote here that we ran out of money. That was the first blow, because people rarely work gratis. Most of the process engrs were let go, and since they were young and process engrs, they got jobs elsewhere. The knowledge that we pushed out the door was replaced, for better or worse, by the operators who survived the purge.
Seeing that his vision would never come to fruition, the CEO hollowed out the HQ and then quit (the old "spend more time with my family" selflessness) and the founder who wanted to build the company took over. Though a brilliant process engineer, his management skills would appear and disappear like a rabbit in a magician's act, and to be honest he and the rest of the group at HQ were battling just to keep the company afloat. They managed to bring in some new investors, whose money kept us going but whose expectations ruined the company. More on that some other time.
Given the preoccupations at corporate, those of us at the plant were able to set our own priorities without much "direction". I need to be very clear with my meaning here. We had an all-white whiteboard. There were few policies and few procedures. There was no bureaucracy telling us what we could do or couldn't do. There wasn't much money to invest to fix the EPC's screw-ups, but we could get by. As a manager it was pretty dam close to nirvana.
And yet. Do you have an employee who works just fine with some direction, but if you give him no direction he will do nothing? I would venture to guess all managers and supervisors run into this in the course of their careers, often with hourly employees. But it's not very common for a plant manager, is it?
In a way we should have seen it coming. The plant manager had started as an engineer at a Fortune-500 company and moved around to chase promotions, eventually topping out as a plant manager with a multi-national before they realized their mistake and pulled him back into the chorus. He quit there to join us, and he actually worked quite well with our first CEO, who had been a plant manager himself back in the day and knew what he was doing. The second CEO let go of the leash and the plant manager responded by spending all his time in the kennel.
I've never aspired to be the plant manager. I like building things. I fear I'd be even more of a workaholic. I've seen guys and gals chase the ring and generally demean themselves in the chase. Because it is a chase - it takes a lot of effort. At the very least, someone needs to think you are very good at your job, and even if you aint you need to spend more effort convincing someone that you are. I guess if you've sought something your whole career it might be an anti-climax once you get there when you find it isn't all it's cracked up to be. Maybe once you get there you figure you can relax and let everyone else do the work. Or perhaps you figure that you got to the top and now the world owes you a living. I don't know.
But what I know is that attitude flows down from the top. I've tried over and over to create some positivity from my perch in the middle, but it never takes. Our people point to the corner office and ask why they should bust their butts when he never does. I can tell them that he has some skills that help us (which is sorta true), but they roll their eyes and shake their heads. They see him show up late and leave early. They see that he rarely goes into the plant and when he does he is as engaged as he would be at the Nordstrom half-yearly sale for women.
This all is ending, and it won't end well.
I wrote here that we ran out of money. That was the first blow, because people rarely work gratis. Most of the process engrs were let go, and since they were young and process engrs, they got jobs elsewhere. The knowledge that we pushed out the door was replaced, for better or worse, by the operators who survived the purge.
Seeing that his vision would never come to fruition, the CEO hollowed out the HQ and then quit (the old "spend more time with my family" selflessness) and the founder who wanted to build the company took over. Though a brilliant process engineer, his management skills would appear and disappear like a rabbit in a magician's act, and to be honest he and the rest of the group at HQ were battling just to keep the company afloat. They managed to bring in some new investors, whose money kept us going but whose expectations ruined the company. More on that some other time.
Given the preoccupations at corporate, those of us at the plant were able to set our own priorities without much "direction". I need to be very clear with my meaning here. We had an all-white whiteboard. There were few policies and few procedures. There was no bureaucracy telling us what we could do or couldn't do. There wasn't much money to invest to fix the EPC's screw-ups, but we could get by. As a manager it was pretty dam close to nirvana.
And yet. Do you have an employee who works just fine with some direction, but if you give him no direction he will do nothing? I would venture to guess all managers and supervisors run into this in the course of their careers, often with hourly employees. But it's not very common for a plant manager, is it?
In a way we should have seen it coming. The plant manager had started as an engineer at a Fortune-500 company and moved around to chase promotions, eventually topping out as a plant manager with a multi-national before they realized their mistake and pulled him back into the chorus. He quit there to join us, and he actually worked quite well with our first CEO, who had been a plant manager himself back in the day and knew what he was doing. The second CEO let go of the leash and the plant manager responded by spending all his time in the kennel.
I've never aspired to be the plant manager. I like building things. I fear I'd be even more of a workaholic. I've seen guys and gals chase the ring and generally demean themselves in the chase. Because it is a chase - it takes a lot of effort. At the very least, someone needs to think you are very good at your job, and even if you aint you need to spend more effort convincing someone that you are. I guess if you've sought something your whole career it might be an anti-climax once you get there when you find it isn't all it's cracked up to be. Maybe once you get there you figure you can relax and let everyone else do the work. Or perhaps you figure that you got to the top and now the world owes you a living. I don't know.
But what I know is that attitude flows down from the top. I've tried over and over to create some positivity from my perch in the middle, but it never takes. Our people point to the corner office and ask why they should bust their butts when he never does. I can tell them that he has some skills that help us (which is sorta true), but they roll their eyes and shake their heads. They see him show up late and leave early. They see that he rarely goes into the plant and when he does he is as engaged as he would be at the Nordstrom half-yearly sale for women.
This all is ending, and it won't end well.
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