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Bill hadn’t. Bill interpreted the casual dress code as anything within the letter of the law, which was no jeans, no underwear showing, no torn clothes, and a shirt with a collar, and anyone at the country club would have understood that to mean you come to work looking like Tiger Woods. Bill, on the other hand, wore loud Hawaiian shirts and guayaberas, which worked for him, because he had a good-size gut that the untucked shirts covered. In fact, Bill was a bald guy with a beard in late middle age who didn’t go to the gym, and he didn’t even care that he didn’t go to the gym. Mike thought it made his whole area look bad. Then, after minutes or hours, nobody knows, inspiration struck. Mike swept away the whole feckless falsework of voting: he’d institute 360-degree reviews for all his people as part of the process to determine who got laid off. Conventional reviews, of course, were done by the boss on subordinates. 360-degree reviews were done, theoretically, by everyone on everyone else. Mike called another staff meeting to announce his new plan. "Well, gee," said Bill, "exactly who gets a 360-degree review here? Do we get to do appraisals on you, Mike?" "No." "Do we get to do appraisals on the CIO?" Mike gave him a quick warning look. "Of course not." "Do we get to do 360-degree appraisals on our own peers in other areas?" "No." "But our peers in other areas do the 360-degrees on us." "That's right." "Well, this doesn't sound very 360-degrees to me," Bill went on. "We all know there are people in other departments who are hard to work with. They don't carry their weight on the project teams we have to work on. We have a lot of delays because they don't deliver their part of the work on time. Shouldn't we be able to make some kind of appraisal that points this problem out about them, if they can say bad things about us?" Mike began to see where this was going. He didn't like it. "We already have that option," he said. "Come again?" "You always have the option of telling someone what you think. You're always able to write someone a memo and just say, this is what I think of how you do your work, and I'm going to treat this just as if it were an annual appraisal. You can say I'm rating you down in teamwork, for instance. . ." "Are you kidding?" Bill asked. "If anyone went ahead and did something like that, all they'd do is poison the atmosphere for themselves in the whole company." "I'm just saying that you always have that option," said Mike. "We're not going to do it in our 360-degree appraisal program here, though." It turned out that what "360-degree review" meant to Mike was that everyone else in the IS department, bosses and workers alike, got to write appraisals of all Mike’s people. Mike’s people, on the other hand, didn't get to write appraisals of anyone else. Not even Mike. Bill had a contact in human resources and gave him a call about it. “Mike wants to have everyone in the IS department write reviews on his people to let him know which ones he should lay off. We don’t get to do reviews on anyone else. Isn’t that against company policy somehow?” ”Not really,” said the human resources guy. ”But doesn’t policy say that annual appraisals are done on the standard appraisal form?” ”Yes, but nothing says a manager can’t use any form he likes for any other purpose he might have in mind. What Mike is doing isn’t an annual appraisal. We can’t stop him from doing something like that.” ”OK,” said Bill, and hung up the phone. “Just a bunch of overpaid enablers,” he muttered to himself. Bill had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen. Once they’d told the IS department in the big meeting that mass layoffs were coming, the atmosphere turned venomous right away. They all suddenly realized they still had several months to swing into full back-biting mode. Here Mike was offering everyone else in the department a chance to screw his own people on official-looking appraisal forms, and there was no way Mike’s people could fight back. This would have the effect of making Mike a really popular guy with a lot of folks. Not his own subordinates, of course, but there were a lot more people in the IS department who didn’t work for Mike than who did, and they’d all be given the chance to take a free kick at everyone in Mike’s area. ”I can just see it,” said Bill the next day at lunch. He seemed more than a little shaken. “Everyone who has the tiniest grudge against any one of us. And it doesn’t even need to be that – some manager who wants to give a better break for one of his own guys can screw one of us who might be in line for the same slot.” ”You’re
really worried about this, aren’t you?” said Al Shultz.
“I don’t think it’s a big deal.” |