Category Archives: Working For Others

Hindsight is so humbling. It took me 45 years of professional life to arrive at the following conclusion:

Setting expectations correctly is far more important than the actual work that you do.

I have been on many projects where we accomplished miracles, only to incur heavy management censure for our disappointing performance.

I have even been fired while producing the output of several design engineers. I realized much later this was because I was disappointing more people than I was satisfying. It was small comfort that I was replaced by four engineers.

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One of the most terrifying things that can happen to you as an employee is to find yourself in possession of information that reveals serious wrongdoing by someone of higher rank in the organization. No matter what you do with the information you may lose your job, but you could be emotionally scarred as well if you are not prepared. Even if you are prepared, you may not have a happy outcome. It might be only bearable at best.

I have been in this situation twice and have known several others who have found themselves involuntarily forced into becoming whistleblowers. It is not a situation one cares to repeat, but there are some things you should know which may help you survive with your sanity and dignity intact. By the way, we were all fired, for reasons which will become obvious.

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You may think your working conditions are bad, but be thankful you are not working for McWane Inc., one of America’s largest privately owned corporations, and one of the nation’s most persistent violators of workplace safety and environmental laws.

In the U.S., since 1995, they’ve been guilty of more than 400 health and safety violations in workplaces they own in 10 states. Since 1995, 4,600 workers have been injured in their foundries and 9 have died.

You might wonder how the McWane family, which is known in Birmingham, Alabama, for its quiet generosity, can justify such callous and inhumane business practices. The company’s managers call it the McWane way, otherwise referred to as Disciplined Management.

This term, disciplined management, is eerily reminiscent of German treatment of slave labor during the Second World War. It is what happens when there is an extreme concentration on financial results with no thought for the real costs in human lives and damage to the environment.

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Something seems to be happening out among the cubicles where employees wait restlessly for the end of the day. There is now a name for this phenomenon. warm-chair attrition (warm-chair uh.TRISH.un) n. The loss of workplace productivity due to employees … Continue reading →