Hi All,

First, I wanted to compliment Carol on the nice job she did on responding to the question about corporate gossip. It’s a tough one. But here’s a favorite maxim of mine. DON’T LET PROBLEMS FESTER. There are too many times in my career that I just felt I was too busy to deal with a problem and waited until it hit me in the face. One time, however, I did something that saved my career. My boss had come up with a new scheme of management. He called it “matrix management” and what it meant was that people didn’t report to any one person, they reported to multiple people. So-o-o some people got very good at never being accountable for anything. They always just switched which boss they paid attention to at the appropriate time. For me, this meant that I couldn’t count on anyone to meet their commitments. Another department head in my area had made a commitment he couldn’t possibly meet and he just kept leaning on people harder and harder – like they had no life outside of work. I think it was the only time at work I felt truly frightened. So I wrote the “Cover Your Ass” letter. I told my boss and my boss’ boss what was happening and that I couldn’t meet my commitments if we continued the matrix management approach. They didn’t get angry because I sent the letter only to them. But when our area got in such trouble that a special task force was set up to look into the situation, I pulled out my letter. Out of four managers I was the only one who didn’t lose my job or get demoted. But I did get put into another job I didn’t want. It took a long time to recover. After that, I always told my managers to look around and watch for problems, to not be hasty, but to speak up or record their concerns when they saw a significant problem.
Any other examples of this sort of thing?

Judy