Musings at Altitude

My son works for the world’s largest corporation.  He came home a couple weeks ago and said, “I’m going to write a book “Life at the Bottom of the World’s Largest Corporation.”  He then spent the next hour or two talking about the ignorance of his managers, the hypocrisy of the corporation itself, and the frustrations he feels about working in a system that according to him, “just doesn’t work.”

I was thinking about my son and his book writing dream right after the Super Bowl as I joined millions of others watching “The Undercover Boss”, and I smiled as the President and COO of Waste Management left the comfort and insulation of his “top floor office” to go down and experience life at the lowest levels of his company.  He worked undercover in trash separation, trash collecting, portable toilet cleaning, landfill cleanup and administration.  At each stop, he seemed to be very enlightened about the insanity of policies that he and his team created up top that were passed down for implementation.  More importantly, he seemed to see very clearly the impact those policies had on the very people who he needed to do their jobs well in order for Waste Management to be the company he wanted them to be.

The show ended with him talking individually to each one of the people he worked with during his undercover assignment, and then him opening his heart to his entire team as he explained what he did and briefed them on what he had learned, what he was going to do with what he learned, and what he hoped could be changed throughout the company because of his experience.

I wonder what would happen if the leaders of every company went undercover and spent time at the bottom of their organizations doing the critical work needed to deliver the revenue and income they expected AND held people accountable for.  I listen to the stories my son tells, and I wonder if those in significant roles of his company have spent any time doing the work that he’s expected to do every single day.  I also wonder if the managers just one or two levels above him remember what it was like to be “on the floor” as they get promoted and seem to immediately forget about what it was like just years or even months earlier when they were in the very same position.

It’s an unfortunate tendency for folks to lose perspective during that climb up the corporate ladder.  We tend to spend more time looking up than empathizing down, and the result is a push for policies and practices that seem perfect to achieve the goals of the upper management but may not be practical at all when implemented and may not come close to achieving the objectives.  More importantly, those upwardly mobile managers and executives construct a self imposed chasm between themselves and the very people doing the work of the company, and the people doing the work then view with suspicion and distrust anything that comes flowing down and is thrown across that chasm.

If my son does indeed write a book, I’m anxious to read it.  The stories have been quite amazing, and the chasm seemingly quite large!  I’d certainly learn a lot from it, and maybe some of his current chain of command would read and learn as well!