Dr. Sullivan

Someone around here, I don't know who left out a copy of a news article from The Wall Street Journal concerning our company. The article was titled "Your Career Matters: In Hot Demand, Retention Czars Face Tough Job." Out of curiosity I picked it up and started reading. Then my jaw dropped. The article was about a guy named Dr. John Sullivan who had been brought in at corporate as a hiring/retention consultant. Dr. Sullivan apparently wasted no time in studying our company's culture and in less than seven months he accurately identified every single major problem we have. I mean this guy was dead on with his observations and he even gave Supergeek solid solutions for correcting our woes. Problem was Supergeek and the rest of the top dogs refused to listen to him. Typical.

During the tech boom of 1999-2000 job attrition across most hi-tech companies was at an all time high. People were scrambling to find a good job, and then once settled would promptly go out and find a better job. Skilled workers at almost any level were in total demand. Wanting to find ways of keeping our employees from quitting Dr. Sullivan began to look very closely at the company's negative aspects.

One of our biggest company wide problems is that we have an abundance of lower level managers with little skill or aptitude for making good business decisions. Nor do they have skills to deal well with the people that work for them. Generally speaking these supervisors treat their top performing employees very poorly while favoring non-performers and kiss asses. As a result, the star employees either quit working in that department which disrupts production on their former line or they quit the company altogether. Then we lose the value of time and resources invested in that person. I've seen this happen over and over again here, it's a serious issue. To deal with this, Dr. Sullivan recommended identifying all of the worst supervisors and getting rid of them. Upper management refused to do so.

Here at this division Dr. Sullivan gave a presentation to management. Shortly after he began to speak about 10 of our supervisors got up and walked out of the room. Why? Because Dr. Sullivan was telling them the truth, that they were bad managers. Their ears were closed as usual, not wanting to hear any of it. I imagined both The Drunk and The Beard were two of the first to walk out.

After seven months of fighting with Supergeek and upper management Dr. Sullivan quit the company. How ironic that the man they hired to retain talent ended up quitting. That says quite a bit about us, I think. Today most if not all of the same problems we've had for years are still plaguing us. When I finished reading the article I made some more photocopies of it and I highlighted a few sections that talked about our problem managers. I even hand wrote in a note saying, "This means you" then I walked around to the offices of some supervisors who in my opinion are the worst of the worst and should be eliminated. I left a copy on their chairs. Nothing would come of it, but I knew they would see it and read the WSJ article first thing the following morning. They'd be angry. Just thinking about that made me feel better before I left for the night.