Respect

Don’t worry; I’m not going to break into song. It’s just that over the weekend I remembered something an old boss of mine had said, just before I decided he was a complete nincompoop and quit the company. One of my co-workers was a fairly serious martial artist, and the Boss had introduced him to an acquaintance who was a high-level master of some martial arts form or other; it might even have been the same one my co-worker practiced. My co-worker (who had been studying the martial arts all of his life and had a fairly high ranking of his own) was polite and respectful during the meeting, but when pressed about it later, had told our Boss that he intended to continue with his own studies and the teachers who had gotten him this far. When pressured, he said that despite the “master’s” qualifications, he didn’t think it was a good fit for him; he could learn more the way he was going.

Well, needless to say, the Boss was outraged. This was The Master of Whatever (I’m sorry; I can’t remember the name 17 years later) and my co-worker was just some pissant who could not understand the honor he was being offered. The Boss ranted (to me – and I was not in management in this company, I was just another pissant) about how disrespectful this was, of this friend, The Master of Whatever, and of the Boss himself. From then on, my co-worker was unable to do anything right, at least as far as the Boss was concerned, and soon left the company, despite having been one of our best producers for the three previous years.

I call this to your attention for two reasons. One, of course, is the old line about “Respect is not given; it is earned.” You can earn respect from your employees in many ways, but yelling at them, belittling them in front of their co-workers, or finding fault with their work because they refuse to kiss your ass (or that of someone you designate) are all so counterproductive that I can’t even think of a bad metaphor for how counterproductive they are. Stupid isn’t even the word. It was bad enough that the Boss couldn’t grasp that one of his employees might have a different view of the world from his own; the fact that said employee was an expert in this subject (a 3rd degree black belt, if I remember correctly) and the Boss was not (he was a big, fat, overdeveloped man who had been a professional baseball player twenty years and eighty pounds earlier. I could have taken him with a Q-tip) just made it worse.

But the fact that he then decided to make management decisions based on this difference of opinion was infinitely worse. In the end, his insistence that my co-worker kiss ass on command cost our company between $350,000 and $500,000 per year – and back then, that was a lot of money. In the long run, in fact, this same behavior cost the company a lot more – since I left shortly thereafter, as did most of the unit’s best people. Basically, everyone who had an ounce of self-respect and/or integrity packed it in and left, costing the company of at least a few million dollars per year, and shortly thereafter costing the Boss his job, as well.

The problem in this situation wasn’t that our Boss needed to be a better manager – he knew the profession quite well, in fact. The problem was that he needed to be a better man – and they don’t teach you how to do that in business school…