An increasingly pervasive attitude with today’s managers and business owners is that employees are nothing more than tools or pieces of equipment that exist to create and enhance the entity’s bottom line. If the equipment’s cost of maintenance begins to rise or if the fixed cost of the employee (ie from pay raises or increases in benefits due to time in grade) increases and it begins to degrade the bottom line, then it is time to replace it with a cheaper model.
Why Engineers Make Lousy Managers
Being an engineer and having worked for a wide variety of organizations over the past 27 years, I have come to believe that as a rule engineers make lousy managers. It is not because the engineers that get promoted to management are not smart people or they do not care about the health and welfare of the company, it is because usually the ones that get promoted are highly productive and have a very high utilization rate. As a result, they are more concerned about billability and production than they are about nurturing relationships. It takes time to build tight client relationships and usually much of that time is not billable or accounted for in project budgets. As a result, employees are told to stay off the phone, stay on task and bill, bill, bill.
Every Business is a Relationship Driven
During my orientation with a prominent water resources engineering firm for whom I managed an office, the senior VP who was my direct supervisor made a point of telling me to never forget that ours was a relationship business. The company had been built on strong client relationships that had stood for over 35 years. This group really GOT IT! It was a result of this philosophy that during my recruitment the top brass had seemed concerned over the number of jobs that I had on my resume. The majority of the decision makers had been with the firm for 25 plus years. They wanted someone who would be committed to building and maintaining long-term relationships. This company really understood that close client relationships meant they saved money on marketing. When an existing client called with a possible project, virtually all of the time spent with the client was billable from hour one. The only instance when the time was written off to marketing was when the project did not proceed further.
What Precipitated This Post
Today I just found out that one of my neighbors was laid off. But they were not laid off in what I would consider an honorable fashion. My neighbor was a regional manager for a company that operated in several states. The premise was he was going to be elevated to a more regional level and his company hired a lesser paid person to take over his territory. My neighbor even trained this guy! My friend was being asked to move his family to Washington so he could concentrate on the states of Oregon and Washington…areas that were weak for this company.
After submitting his weekly reports after an extended business trip to the Northwest, my neighbor’s boss asked if they could get together to discuss some things. The meeting happened on Monday in Gilroy, California (about 3 hours from Bakersfield). At the meeting, my friend was given a severance package and told he was laid off.
Management did not have the balls to give this loyal employee an inkling that something was up. They let him train his successor, put his home on the market (in a depressed real estate market, no less), and then summarily discharged him like a piece of equipment that had outlived its useful life in order to save a few bucks. The company was arrogant enough to think my neighbor’s contacts and his client relationships belonged to them. What they will find out is that once a trusting relationship has been created, it will survive almost any circumstance. The bottom line will temporarily improve, but over the long haul his old company will be the big loser.
Relationships are a company’s most valuable asset and the people who create them are indispensable.
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