Comment 39414

By Brandon (registered) | Posted April 02, 2010 at 07:55:22

Kiely,

Right now it's all about the quarterly results. I firmly agree that if you treat your employees as an investment you will get much better returns from them, but since I'm not in a public corporation, what the heck do I know? ;)

My sister-in-law works for TD Insurance and has many horror stories about management (she's a team leader, sort of management/staff hybrid). One instance was where they had a suggestion box for staff, but in the management meetings the managers would "interpret" the questions well away from the original intent, but made the senior management feel better about what they were doing.

Another friend works at GM. A common occurrence there is for a manager to make a decision that will provide short-term gain but long-term pain, but get promoted based on the short-term results, which means that it's the next guys fault when things go bad. As these guys get promoted, well, you can see how the system self-selects for bad long-term planning.

Is there a solution? I decided 13 years ago that I'd never be beholden to someone else for my success, so now I'm self-employed with over 200 bosses instead of just 1. People have always told me I was crazy for not having job security, but in this era, that concept really has no meaning. People who strive for "safety" and little or no decision making often find themselves in situations where the decisions of others leave them out in the cold.

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