And The Winner Is...

It’s probably no surprise that The Office is one of my favourite TV shows.   Michael Scott, the manager, hosts an annual awards night called the Dundies. where each employee wins an award in a category hand picked for them including the ‘Don’t Go In There After Me’ award, the ‘Tight Ass’ award, and the ‘Whitest Sneakers’ award.  In my working career, I’ve had the great privilege of working with lots of bosses and since awards season is right around the corner, I think it’s time they got some award-show style recognition.

Michael Scott...the kind of manager we should all aspire to become

The first category, the ‘Kind but Creepy’ award, goes to an old boss from my days in the fast food biz…I was managing a couple of his locations during the school year, and I was planning to go home for the summer.  He wanted me to stay, and I told him that I couldn’t afford to stay there and pay rent for the summer.  In the ‘Kind’ department, he told me that since he was hardly ever in town, (his home was in Thunder Bay), that I could have his apartment for the summer, rent free, and that we’d just have to be roomies when he came to town for a day or two each month.

Like Oscar and Felix, we were a couple of odd roomies

That sounded like an excellent deal, and it worked out well, until the day I got home from work and found him in the bathroom, door open, sitting on the toiled taking care of the day’s business.  That was awkward enough, but when you add the fact that he was sitting there eating a big plate of dinner, that’s the ‘Creepy’ part.  Kind?  Yes.  Creepy?  Freakin' right.   Still, toilet-dining aside, he was a good and generous boss.

It's always a shock to see your boss eating dinner on the crapper

In the ‘Napolean Knew Best’ category, the winner is one of my bosses from my days in the car rental business.  Like the diminutive Bonaparte, he was also a height-challenged French man.  What he lacked in tallness he more than made up for in attitude and temper.

When I wrecked one of the rental cars in an unfortunate roll-over accident on a night filled with freezing rain, other accidents, and floating timbits, instead of inquiring as to my well-being, he asked why I couldn’t have been one of the thousands of other drivers who managed to get their vehicles home safe that night.  If he saw you reading the newspaper at work, he blasted, "…you’d better be looking for a job…" as he trotted past you.  If you showed any compassion to him when he was feeling under the weather by asking, "Are you feeling alright?" he informed you that, "I give headaches, I don’t get them."

The only thing he was missing was his horse.  And his guillotine.  I'm not sure if the same could be said for Napolean, but this man could make me laugh.  

I once had a Regional Director, and often, our travel schedules synced up, so we shared cabs and flights and fairly regularly, a cocktail or meal at the airport.  She is the winner of the ‘Holy Crap, Really?’ award.  For a while, every time we were together, she would turn the conversation around to issues of the team, and engagement.  Who’s happy?  Who’s not?  What’s really going on?  And being fairly junior, and clearly not that bright, I didn’t exactly figure out, at least at the beginning, that she was digging for dirt, so I blathered on and on, talking about my manager, and what was working and what wasn’t.  (Stupid, right?  I know, I know).

My boss asked, I answered.  Bad Sean.  Bad.

On one surreal day, she sent me an email and told me that she wanted to meet.  Somehow I got it into my head that I was getting a raise.  I walked in, and she was formal and frosty.  She sat me down and told me how disappointed she was with my lack of professionalism.  She told me that team players don’t blab, and that she was writing me up for engaging in gossip.  To say I was stunned would have been the understatement of the century, but there was no arguing, or justifying with this manager.  She, for some reason, which I never learned, decided that she had gotten enough information out of me, and it was time to shut off the information faucet by slapping a letter in my file.

I was sick to my gossipy stomach, as this was my first official, ‘this will be a black mark on your permanent record’ kind of smackdown I had ever received.  The irony is, that aside from this bizarre event, I owe the last 20 years of my career to one or two opportunities made possible by this director. 

The first "letter in my file"...stayed there til my next boss took pity on me and shredded it.

The Sarah Palin Lifetime Achievement Award goes to a boss I really liked, and who gave me more opportunities than I can count, but who spent a great deal of time focused on her image.  The main difference between her and Sarah was that when my boss knew she was in over her head, she expected somebody to throw her a life preserver.   She also commanded an impressive knowledge of modern ‘business-speak’ buzzwords, more than enough of these ‘bumper stickers’ to fill any gaps in the conversation, often without betraying the fact that she didn’t know the answer.

Definition of acluistic :

(ā-clü'ĭst-ĭc) (adj.) Describing or pertaining to anything clueless; without a clue.

One of her most over-used (and frequently mocked) go-to buzz-phrases was…”Really guys, on this issue, I’m Switzerland.”  You used to hear it occasionally when a leader wouldn’t have an opinion on a particular issue…neutral, like Switzerland during the Second World War.    However, my boss used it every time she didn’t understand an issue, so it became a running joke.  If she wasn’t at a meeting, people would ask, "Who’s representing the good people of Switzerland today?"  If someone had a hard-line opinion, they would say, “Really guys, I’m North Korea on this issue” (or whichever country du jour was known for taking aggressive stances).  I really liked working for her, but sometimes she was just a little too acluistic.

What else do you think when somebody proclaims, "I am Switzerland"?

The Indiana Jones Temple of Doom award goes to a manager who spent her entire life looking over her shoulder.  She just knew something was out there, lurking, waiting to get her, and she was on a quest to find it, before it found her.  “Sean…” she said on many occasions, “…the most important job of a leader is to root out the Boogey Men.  You need to find them and deal with them.”   She was mostly talking about our own people who, from inside the business, would do us harm.   Hmmm.  I missed that one on every single day of manager school.

  

Indy:  Famous slayer of bad guys and boogey men

I really do understand that keeping your eyes open and anticipating the things flying at you that need to be dealt with is something every good leader needs to do.  In this case, there were actual real marketing, product development, revenue, and operations issues that didn’t attract nearly as much attention as the scary monsters in the closet.  Instead, she focused on boogey men.  I dunno about that one, but I did learn a lot of other valuable lessons while reporting to her.

Better watch out for monsters

The winner of the I’ll Take Geography for $1000, Alex award goes to one of my favourite bosses of all time.  We were once sitting in a bar overlooking the St. John’s harbour, in Newfoundland.   I had just been chastised by a customer for making some bold comments about my knowledge of Newfoundland geography that turned out to be really, really wrong.  My boss, who was giving me a hard time for the geographic blunder in the meeting said, (completely seriously, albeit ironically), "It’s great to just sit here, and stare out into Peggy’s Cove…it’s beautiful."  As it turns out, Peggy’s Cove is in Nova Scotia.

Beautiful Peggy's Cove, NS

Beautiful, but not Peggy's Cove

The winner of the I’m the Boss, So I’ll Say What I Want award is a former CEO I greatly admire.  First, because of his skill as a leader and grower of businesses, but second, because the guy could say whatever he wanted and get away with it every time.  I’m a chubby dude, and I remember being I was quite proud of myself because I’d lost about 25 pounds…I was standing by the elevator when the CEO stopped in his tracks, and looked at me.  I thought he was going to compliment my weight loss, but instead said, “Slater… man, you’re getting harder and harder to miss.”  Take away the folksy Scottish accent and his disarming smile, and the bastard just told me I was getting fatter.  Cheers.

"I don't mean to be rude, but have you gained some weight, Sean?"

Being a manager is tough, and I don’t mean any disrespect to any of my former bosses…in fact, I owe each of them a lot. Every one of them gave me the opportunity to learn and grow.  Even Napolean.