Selfish Leadership

Selfish Leadership

Brian C. Thompson

Columbia Southern University

Selfish Leadership

The company leadership at a former employer had a lot of opportunities for improvement and definitely showed me some tactics to which I will never use in my managerial career.  This short paper will go over some of their techniques, discuss the positive or negative aspects of each and suggest any better options that they could have used to retain valuable associates.

Ethical stance of stakeholders

        The stakeholders within Company X are fairly vast especially within our facility of around 800 associates.  The major stakeholders include groups of line employees, middle management, upper management, our suppliers and our customers.  The professional ethics to which each of these groups is to uphold are extremely similar in that you are to provide quality product in a safe environment and act with integrity, competence and respect.

Most people in the workforce want to work in this “safe environment” where everyone does the right thing all of the time but unfortunately that does not always occur.  At all levels of Company X, people would get very stressed or sometimes had agendas that caused them to think of themselves above and beyond the company or other individuals.  The Vice President and departmental managers were caught in many lies to all levels of associates which caused uneasiness throughout the company and a severe lack of trust.  I had many line level associates tell me that they were severely distraught over the personality traits that upper management openly portrayed and that they did not want to work for a company that “obviously encouraged such behavior”.  Many of these associates would get upset because they would be told that they were working during the upcoming weekend (this happened more times than not) and then later in the shift their supervisor would brag about all of the fun they had planned for the weekend.  Needless to say this caused a lot of animosity throughout the facility.

Our customers and suppliers were very top notch companies that did a great job of leading by example while trying to help Company X as much as possible.  Our main customer offered free managerial classes to our upper management that were unattended.  They would also send specialists to our company so that we could learn from their techniques which are worldwide standards in most cases.  Some of our suppliers would come to our facility at the drop of a dime to assist in any perceived issue that we had with their products which most of the time was Company X individuals pushing the blame onto someone else instead of doing their job correctly.

Direct Support

During the two years that I worked for Company “X” my direct boss had been with the company almost 20 years.  This gentleman was a very nice guy, would probably do just about anything for anyone and definitely knew about the product that was produced in the facility.  The main issue that held this Senior Engineer and inherently his subordinates back was his philosophy of “that’s how we’ve always done it”.  Unfortunately, this is the only company that he had ever worked for so all of the techniques that he had learned from Company X were all that he knew so any change that was suggested never gained much traction with him.

While this person was very cordial and easy going, the personality traits that he exhibited were a version of passive direct interpersonal workplace aggression tactics (Fredericksen, 2013, p. 227).  An example of how the Senior Engineer’s mentality could have hurt the company is when I suggested a new fixture design for a piece of equipment that had many hours of downtime every week.  I showed him the initial cost of this project (roughly $2,200) had a Return on Investment of less than two months but he stated that the current fixture was the style that they had always used so he had serious doubts that a new one could be successful.  After numerous discussions, I was extremely frustrated with his tactics so I told him “you hired because of my knowledge and experience so if you aren’t going to let me do what makes logical sense then I might as well go where somewhere that I can be successful”.  He did not directly tell me that I couldn’t order the materials that I needed so everything was ordered, all of the components were manufactured and I installed the fixture over a holiday weekend.  The fixture eliminate all downtime from this machine over the next 1 ½ years and was so successful that we had started to get more of them made to go on the identical assembly lines that we had.

Another example of this passive aggressive tactic from my Senior Engineer occurred after I made a spreadsheet that tracked all of our projects and work orders that he had asked me to create.  I spent some time creating this file then emailed it to my boss so that he could go over it and put it into action.  Since I had past issues with this individual I liked to email most correspondence so that proof was in writing of our interactions.  He ignored several of my emails and blew off several attempts to talk in person about my assigned project so I figured it was just something that was getting shelved for now.  About four months later our department was emailed a spreadsheet that was about 95% identical to mine from the Senior Engineer and our area manager exclaimed how great it was to have something to track all of our projects on.  I never confronted anyone about this situation but all of the engineers knew what had happened which severely diminished the trust with our management staff.  All of these issues with my direct boss started to take a toll on me to the point that I did not sleep well and felt exhausted every day.  Supervisors are someone that I should trust to do the right thing but in this case it diminished my output and creativity (Han, 2015, p. 24).