Page 155 - Executive Warfare

The Team You Assemble

absolutely terrific. If the layoff represents a particular hardship to them . . .
well, they certainly didn’t deserve such bad luck.
This is a situation in which it really pays to be a human being. I always
had an unwritten policy that in a layoff, the extraordinary cases could
come to see me. I’d have somebody from personnel or the legal depart-
ment there, and they’d get a hearing.
One guy came to see me and told me that his wife had recently been
diagnosed with cancer. She had no medical benefits of her own, and he
couldn’t afford to lose his.
He said, “Could you see your way clear to keeping me on for just a
year?”
He offered to move to a different department if that would be help-
ful—he’d do any job—and if I wanted, he’d write his resignation letter,
dated a year from then, that very day.
Of course I let him stay! For all I know, he’s still with the company.
I can remember one superior who was unhappy with me for making
exceptions when there were layoffs because he was afraid we were going
to be sued by the people who hadn’t gotten a reprieve.
So when I came across somebody who deserved a break, I just changed
the person’s job title and transferred them somewhere where they weren’t
making cuts.
He still wasn’t happy. “You make an
exception every time you hear a sob
IT’S IMPORTANT
story,” he complained.
THAT YOUR
I pointed out to him that the sob sto-
EMPLOYEES SEE
ries happened to be real.
THAT YOU ARE NOT
“It’s not good for the shareholders,”
HEARTLESS.
he said.
I didn’t see it that way.
Fortunately, I soon went to work at John Hancock, where CEOs Jim
Morton and Steve Brown made sure that all the managers underneath
them understood that we were a company with some humanity.

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