Page 154 - Executive Warfare

EXECUTIVE W ARF ARE

I learned a great lesson from Frank’s way of dealing with those two. We
could have fired them, especially since they’d admitted that they’d lied.
And I was ready to pull that trigger. But
Frank knew that it would probably win

THESE GUYS HAD A me a reputation for being thin-skinned.
SCARLET LETTER And he did not want to go to war
PROMINENTLY with the sales force, which already
PINNED TO THEIR found me unsympathetic. So, by show-
SHIRTS. THEY ing some compassion and allowing the
BECAME LIVING black sheep to stay, we eased tensions.At
EMBLEMS OF WHY the same time, since I refused to have
NOT TO SLANDER any contact with them, these guys had a
PEOPLE. scarlet letter prominently pinned to
their shirts. They became living
emblems of why not to slander people.
Over the years, I’d occasionally show some Frank-style mercy and allow
somebody else I could have fired to stay on in a diminished capacity. The
message, “Don’t do what this person did,” stayed fresh in people’s minds
far longer that way than if I’d thrown the offender into the abyss, where
he would have been forgotten in a week or two.
Of course, there are pleasanter ways to motivate people than by put-
ting their peers into the stocks. We’ll talk about those in the next chapter.

WHEN IT COMES TO LAYOFFS,
SOME FLEXIBILITY IS ONLY RIGHT
Generally, when people lose their jobs because the company is trying to
reduce expenses, it happens in relatively large numbers.You may very well
not know the full circumstances surrounding every decision made by the
layers of managers underneath you.
Sometimes managers will use layoffs as a way to get rid of their lower-
performing employees. However, sometimes the people laid off are

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