simplerich

Back to work after a week of vacation and I think… no, I know I could have done with another week and still not wanted to go back. Mostly that’s because the weather is absolutely beautiful now and I don’t want to be inside because I know Old Man Winter is shuffling his way this direction.

If any of you manage anything/anybody I want to recommend a friend of mine, a super nice lady from Hawaii, Rosa Say. As the economy does what it’s doing and seems to steadily ignore what we want it to do Rosa’s post are encouraging. (When I say nice in this context I mean that as a compliment. She’s been encouraging and friendly to people all over the Internet and takes time from what I know is a busy schedule to encourage people whether she’ll ever meet them or not. This is a hugely good character trait in my book.)

http://talkingstory.org/2011/10/3-job-options-of-merit/

I am in favor of encouragement in the face of adversity for a couple of reasons.

1) If looking down the barrel of a bad situation being defeatist or negative won’t help at all. Just the opposite, hope, optimism, and mutual encouragement can make the going smoother even if they don’t address the problem at hand. Attitude is everything.

b) Sometimes weathering bad times isn’t a function of anything we do at all… sometimes big giant things happen to us, hurricanes for example, that we can’t really do anything about and we just have to wait for it to go away and there are times when being open to new ideas, optimistic, and encouraging foster and create an atmosphere where the community going through it all comes out the other side stronger because of the relationships or ideas formed during the hardship. It may be that sitting around a campfire in the devastation of a tornado brings up conversations that “When this is over we should…” and those things, those building blocks actually come to pass.

iii) Encouraging small behavioral changes, things we CAN do helps build things in areas we can change. I can’t personally impact the nation’s economy. What I can do is help my employees with savings and maybe with opportunities to increase their pay with sales incentives and bonus programs. I can’t help everybody, but I can help those I can help and just because it doesn’t stem the tide it does start a ripple that can add to other ripples and maybe that will be enough to change things… or at least moderate things a bit.

IV) Being pleasant to be around is a good thing.

There are a lot of opportunities out there to tear people down for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s just fun to be an ass. I’ve met people who sincerely believe that by bullying or threatening they can help a situation. I happen to really enjoy a debate online as long as nobody resorts to name-calling or takes it personally and starts acting bat-poop crazy. Can all situations be dealt with by applying a healthy dose of Pollyanna-juice? Not all, not all the time. But I can’t think of a situation where being a jerk or making threats was more helpful than being supportive or helpful and encouraging. Maybe it’s time to start a random act of kindness campaign if nothing else.

Take a minute, go check out Rosa’s blog and http://talkingstory.org/2011/10/3-job-options-of-merit/ think of what you can do to help the situation of yourself AND someone else.

Once upon a time there was a digital music service that would provide corporate music with commercials sent to the stores on a monthly subscription service so there was some sort of corporate identity thing along with the sound of the shopping experience. If you’ve ever been to a Fazolis you’ve encountered it for sure.

So, I’m at a store not listening to the background music… that’s what it’s for. It’s in the background… and then I heard it… they lyrics to Bob Dylan’s Hurricane:

And to the black folks he was just a crazy nigger
No one doubted that he pulled the trigger

Do you care to guess what the first word I heard was and what the next words were? Just on a guess?

Now, the song’s about… I’ll let songfacts.com say what it’s about:

This is about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a boxer who spent 19 years in jail for a murder Dylan felt he did not commit.

That’s the short version. The longer version is a black man was convicted (his conviction was eventually overturned) of killing some white people and his jury was made up of all white people… in 1966. Bob Dylan didn’t think he did it and wrote this song to draw attention to the injustice of the situation and hopefully do something to get Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, out of prison.

That’s all very cool But that’s not the part of the song anybody who has heard it today hears. What they/we hear is,

“crazy nigger No one doubted that he pulled the trigger.”

So, I’m not asking if it’s legal to play the song or if it’s a good song. I happen to believe protest songs and such are a powerful tool for change. I happen to think this song is NOT a bad song. It’s not all that entertaining or anything, but it’s a protest song it’s not supposed to be fun. I’m not even going to debate if it’s still topical today or applicable, especially when crap like this is happening where power-crazy police attack minorities (disabled lady in this article) just because they like the power. (no implication of racism here for obvious reasons.)

What I’m asking is, just because someone CAN play a song does it mean they should? What does it say about them when they do that? Does it say anything? If I were listening to the lyrics from the start of the song it wouldn’t be shocking. If it were a contemporary song getting enough radio play that I’d recognize it if I came in during the middle of the song it wouldn’t be an issue… but no radio station is playing this song with any regularity in 2011 and almost nobody 40 or under is going to recognize the song at all even if they’re told the name and who younger than thirty would know who Bob Dylan is/was?

Is it good judgement to play that song? Is it OK for the employees to sing along with the music on their corporate radio? Is it OK for them to sing at the top of their lungs the names of this song? If it’s not… should they choose to play that song? Bob Dylan’s use of the words is protected as freedom of speech. It’s being used artistically. But the same word can be used during the course of a crime and change it from a simple assault to a hate crime… when a word carries that much baggage with it is it a good idea to identify one’s self with it or, if someone complains about it, to defend it’s usage?

I’m a big advocate of the freedom of speech… some battles though I ask myself “are they worth fighting?” What is gained by their insisting on playing this not terribly entertaining song in their stores?

It was 2008 that I wrote a post entitled Mourning Has To End At Some Point regarding the attacks on the USA on September 11, 2001. I think it still stands up 3 years later.

That title brings the imagery of a funeral to the date that has come to be one thing only, the day we were attacked.

My Facebook stream is filled with posts that end with, “We Will Never Forget.” A week a year we remember it publicly, putting ashes in our hair and memorializing the things that happened today 10 years ago. This post isn’t about today. There is an awful lot of stuff out there about today. We all mourn, memorialize, and remember in our own way. I get that and I don’t make any judgement on any of that. The attacks we as a country suffered were something that everybody experienced in their own way.

But.

The weeks after the attacks the country was shocked, stunned, and came together in a catharsis of grief, shock, and anger expressed as a brief period of ultra-patriotism, pride, and outrage.

After the funereal meats were put away, the dishes cleared, and the flowers wilted we, as a country, not specifically you and me, but all of us, began to do what so often happens after a funeral. The death here was the death of a period of growth, optimism, wide-eyed innocence about our own invulnerability… after the immediacy of the funeral was over we split up… we fractured like a family after a funeral of a wealthy patriarch who had no will.

People on the left and right of the political spectrum took the eagle as their totem and began to beat everybody else with how they were the real Americans, the real inheritors of the standard erected by those three emergency responders on ground zero in what is now an iconic image of that day. I choose that image as the image for the post, not the image of the towers burning as DrudgeReport.com did. The optimism of those men raising our flag, all of our flag, on that day, in the clouds of dust and smoke… that image is one of hope, of fighting on, of us saying “NO!” to everything the terrorists were trying to say. That’s the image I hold in my mind 10 years later.

Sadly, the eagles, the American Eagle that each side claims as their own has turned into a vulture picking on the bones of who we were before.  They no longer think of us collectively, but in an US vs THEM way that is akin to one side of a family insisting on the dining room set because Uncle Sam promised it to them, or so they say while the other side insists they’d been told the same thing. The family that is our country is tearing itself apart in a way the terrorists couldn’t by tearing down buildings and killing people. The family that is our country is allowing those who represent us, to scrabble for the scraps of the legacy of the world before we were attacked at the expense of the other side of the aisle. There can be no victory, we are told, unless the other side loses. There can be no progress in any direction if the direction isn’t to the left or to the right, depending on who is doing the talking.

Enough of the sides. If we don’t exist as a family, together, even when we disagree with each other, we don’t exist, period. Benjamin Franklin said it years ago when he said, “We must hang together, gentlemen…else, we shall most assuredly hang separately.” We’re facing that choice today as a country. As we tear apart our country ourselves, 10 years after the terrorists tried to do it TO us we have to make up our minds to exist as a country, and sometimes we will have to not win at the expense of everyone else on the playing field. There are times, in a family when we have to let someone else have the dining room set because the family is worth more than the dining room self is to us.

So, today, 10 years later, I’d like to remind people not that the buildings fell, but that the other iconic image of that was of our flag being raised… of 3 men saying the buildings fell but we’re still here, one nation, one country, one huge group of people with disparate ideas but one flag and one hope, that tomorrow is better than today, and we’re willing to do what we can to make it that way… even if it means, sometimes, letting someone else having the dining room set.

I’m over on google+ and invite you to circle me if you’re over there. It’s NOT just another Facebook, or just another twitter in my experience. There’s more content, more community, and more discussion. It’s still growing and this morning I wrote this over there and thought I’d share it with you over here as well.

I find myself going to things like group.as and wondering what group I want to be a part of… where to look for like-minded people… then I find myself wandering off… the little snippets of description aren’t enough to hook me so I wind up not using it.

I find I’ve no time at all for the Seth G.’s and Guy K.’s and Robert S.’s out there any more. In the same way Kim Kardashian is famous for making a sex tape and then claiming to be a celebrity I find these three famous for… I don’t know what. I know I’m the only one, but it seems like if the three of them talked about why Downy fabric softener is blue within a week there would be a million thought pieces about it on the internet and I don’t find the things they talk about interesting. They plant seeds that others pick up and re-plant just because they are who they are, and don’t seem to pay much attention to what they’re saying and their qualifications for saying what they say is that they’ve said so much before that other people have listened to and parroted. I know that’s unkind, but I can’t get past that feeling I get from them.

I wonder if every morning they wake up feeling like they’re playing a part… being a character created by our perceptions of them and hoping like hell that they can keep running long enough…. because the rest of the Internet follows them so they’ve got a perfect Papier-mâché backside but the front is all just bamboo framework holding it all up, an empty facade that they go to sleep at night praying nobody notices.

Perhaps once they were fresh and new and exciting and that’s why people followed them, but now… now I don’t get that feeling. I didn’t like them then either though… they’ve always seemed affected, put on, like an act.

I’m sure they’re wonderful people underneath the Internet personae that they’ve cultivated. I just don’t click with them at all. When I find myself following a link that winds up at their place I close the tab. I just can’t be bothered to get caught up in the cult of personality they have built around themselves…. did they build it on purpose? Did it happen accidentally and then the beast was so big they didn’t know how to stop it? I can’t imagine it was an accident, but I can’t imagine anybody setting out to have as their job “personality” either. It just feels creepy and needy to me… and vaguely unhealthy.

Their words carry weight not because of their content but by virtue of who said them. That is troublesome to me… That’s the short version.

“Rich, I didn’t get my assigned task done but I’ll finish it tonight when I come in. I didn’t feel good. Don’t be mad.”

That was a note that greeted me recently when I came to work. I was confused. In the whole time I’ve worked with this employee I’d never been mad at them. I couldn’t think of a time I’d been mad at another employee in front of the one who left the note and drew a complete blank. I’m not saying I never get upset or angry with employees. I do. But it’s NOT for doing an assigned task. I also almost never get angry with an employee for breaking a rule (unless it’s one of the fatal four that’ll get you fired at once).

What I get is disappointed. If someone doesn’t meet my expectations I’m disappointed in them. They let me down and the rest of the crew and themselves. That’s often what they mean when they say “Don’t be mad.” Which is strange. How is it that they confuse those two things? I’m not going to go all philosophical or anything, but anger and disappointment aren’t the same at all in me. It’s possible there are people out there who, when they’re disappointed, they lash out… angrily at those around them but I don’t think that’s something I’ve seen in a good manager and I fancy myself at least somewhat in that camp.

If you’re curious what WILL make me mad it’s when an employee tells me they’ll do something and they don’t. If they say they’ll take on a job and they don’t. If they say they will work X hours and then they back out of it… That irritates me because it’s a lie and a violation of trust and it does more that disappoint me it undermines my trust in the individual.

I guess the only other thing is if you call in five minutes before your shift and say something like “I’ve been throwing up since Thursday…” Then why the heck didn’t you call before now?!? I’d have had time to find someone to work. ARGH! That’s pretty rare though.

When I’m training a new employee part of the conversation I have with them is about volunteering for things and offering to do things and how important it is for me if they say they’re going to do something that they do it. If they want to impress me with almost no risk of it back-firing if they wind up unable to do it… do something without telling me ahead of time they’re going to do it. But don’t, oh my… DON’T!!! tell me you’re going to alphabetize the widgets in descending date order and then not do it. That’ll make my hair stand on end. I won’t yell. I won’t rant. I won’t shake my fist at the heavens… OK. I might do that, but not when there’s anybody here. But I will be upset. Telling me you’ll do something and not doing it makes me mad. Failing to meet expectations doesn’t make me mad. It disappoints.

I’ve been asked if I’m mad if I have to fire someone and I’m mostly not. Mostly I’m disappointed they chose to not do the job. One of the things they used to go over at supervisor meetings was that we needed to hire better people and I always looked around the table wondering who out there was intentionally hiring turds. None of us do that. All the background checks in the world won’t tell us if an employee is a good one or not. The calibre of employee isn’t decided by whether or not they’ve passed a background check. Adding the background checks hasn’t decreased turn-over or employee theft. It’s added an expense and delay in the hiring process but that’s it. So when it comes to hiring I tend to hire people I think are capable of doing well. When they don’t and they wind up being let go… I’m more disappointed than angry.  Again… unless they’ve done one of the fatal 4 things… that irritates me because I tell them what those are every day of training and I tell them every day what will happen if they do them so it’s just STUPID of them to do those things… and the part where they obviously think I’m stupid and won’t catch them… that’s the part that makes me mad. I hate being treated like I’m stupid.

So… if you don’t do your cleaning list I won’t be mad. I might take disciplinary action if I think it’s warranted, but I won’t be mad when I do it.