The old management was better than the current management.

The old management was better than the current management. Let this become so self-evident to you that you do not notice if I write it again: The old management was better than the current management.

Every partisan has a consipiracy theory about the enemy, a theory that always can be supported with some evidence no matter what evidence is on hand. It is a windsock that flys full no matter which way the wind is blowing. The old management was better than the current management.

The people I work with will talk about how completely ineffectual their old supervisor was, and generally deride this former supervisor, but the moment their current supervisor does or fails to do anything which results in dissapointment for the workers, then the supervisor is not even as good as the last one. The old management was better than the current management.

Yesterday I heard a story about how the old supervisor’s new coworkers can’t stand her. The same day I heard, “She would have done this for us. She would have done that for us.”

She, whom they scorn, she whose image they blaspheme, is their very Madonna. The old management was better than the current management.

Speaking for myself, two crimes have been comitted recently. First, the performance reviews for the department were delivered at the end of the month, when we most need a motivated and cohesive team. Performance reviews are divisive by nature, but of itself that is not a crime. The evaluations were drawn up by two front-office people with little to no daily contact with the workers being evaluated, and delivered by a third person, the current supervisor. This would be a crime except that, under the circumstances of the poorly handeled, nay, thoroughly botched transition when the last supervisor left, there really was nobody in a good position to make the evaluations. It could have been done better, but the evaluating process was not a crime.

The low evaluations were an insult to people who until recently have been doing their jobs under spotty guidance, but poor reviews can even be tolerated if suitable guidance for improvement is given and no immediate penalty is doled out. What cannot be excused is the rating one hardworking person got, lower than a known goof-off. The one could be nasty with coworkers, but would do a number of different jobs; the other was indifferent to coworkers and did only a few tasks, and those with no great diligence.

That is an injustice, and the hard worker quit. At the end of the month, when we need all the help we can get.

I am sure the old supervisor would have given them all glowing reviews, and covered for all their foibles, and generally assured them that they were being picked on by upper management. I know the current supervisor could have done more to soften the sting if he had wanted to. Beyond doubt the worker who quit deserved a better review than the goof-off who remained.

But there really is no need for individuals or cliques of martyrs, of people who work fairly hard themselves but who will not recognize the contribution of others, or try to take real grievance to the appropriate supervisors, but instead ridicule most of the people they work with. It makes my blood sour.

The other crime occurred Saturday. We had a lofty shipment goal this month, even loftier than the lofty goals we missed the last two months. This being the end of a quarter, the pressure was tripled. Everyone in the plant pleged their full support and manual labor if need be. But when the call went out, it came back unanswered. We had a few people one day, and one or two a couple more days, but nothing like the scores of people supposedly at our disposal. One crew came down only to vanish as soon as their regular supervisor was out of sight.

So basically, all these people from so many different department who were admonising us to make sure we met our shipment goal, to the point that they would give us whatever help we needed–well, they were all enjoying their Saturday at home, while we worked.

The new supervisor in the department is pretty much an eight-hour guy. He usually gets in a little after seven and leaves a little after four. I tend to freak out and work overtime. He and I report to the same person, so I am not directly repsonsible to him, so it does not directly matter to me what hours he works. But I definitely worked more hours in the five days leading up to Saturday than he did. I’m not sure how many–a fourteen, a couple of elevens I think. Enough to be tired and a little unbalanced on Saturday.

So when he dissappeared in the middle of the day Saturday and everyone got upset, I got upset with them. He left me a note saying he’d be “out for a bit” and to call if I needed him, which is exactly what other salaried people have said to our department before skipping out to enjoy their weekend. We were all pissed off. The old management was better than the current management, remember? She would have stayed longer than anyone, and brought in food for everyone.

The funny thing is that the new supervisor did come back after a couple of hours, and told me that it was his anniversary and his daughter’s birthday. Not to mention it later turned out that his children would be out of town next weekend, so that this was their Easter weekend. I felt bad for joining in the sarcastic remarks earlier in the day. Even though at the time I didn’t know any of the mitigating circumstances surrounding this crime, I know the man well enough to suspect he hadn’t simply gotten bored and gone home.

Nevertheless, although he does not and should not justify everything he does to the people who work for him, as I would try to do if I were him, in this situation he really should have let people know why he was leaving them in their hour of need.

That was a crime.

But overall he has shown good qualities. He has spent a couple of hours following someone through each of the different tasks within the department, and comes out to work on the floor when he feels that the pace is dropping off, rather than telling everyone their numbers are falling behind (which is what I would do); if they keep a good pace he does not even mention to them that they are not doing as much as they need to do to make the monthly goal. Instead he quietly goes into his office and sends e-mails or makes phone calls for help that does not come.

I have seen him state that his people are doing their job when someone else says they are not, and I have heard of the many times when he has told people not to try to push their work off on his people. He stands up for the department, including me even though I don’t work for him, and he gets his opinions of people from first-hand observations.

This man, PB, there are things that he does not like, and they pretty much all belong to the family of “doing things that are not your job on paid time.” Conversations, whether on the phone or in person; smoke breaks; walking around the factory without a job-related reason. He thinks all of this can be done during the designated break periods. Conversation is the trickiest to manage. People will have conversations during the day, including PB, and it is unreasonable and ultimately unproductive to try to eliminate them. But a lot of the phone calls are needless personal calls, and a lot of the talk on the floor is needless complaining about other people in the department.

There are other things that don’t bother PB so much. Personal eccentricities don’t get very high on his grudge list. The way people look, or talk, or the different ways in which they each think highly of themselves do not bother PB nearly so much as they bother some other people in the department. If there is a slow and steady worker who does not take extra breaks or make extra phone calls or complain bitterly about coworkers, PB seems to prefer that worker over the one who is a fast worker, and just as quick to point out flaws in coworkers.

In other words, PB is a good supervisor. But he will always have certain shortcomings when compared to the old supervisor, who was indulgent toward her employees, and achieved most accomplishments at the cost of standards.

The old management was better than the current management.