My Jobs, The Blame's on Me

Last week I shared some of my career history and left off when the dot com bubble burst. Today I continue this series by giving details on the next position I held.

As you recall, I made the shift to the head of marketing for a sister company when the dot com I was working for went under. The company was what I'd call a smaller mid-sized company ($300 million in sales) that had been declining the past few years. Competition was eating away at its base of sales and the company president, a wonderful man and good leader in times of plenty, was not the right person for the job when times got tough. In short, the company was in a slow death spiral.

What did this mean? The business was losing sales and profits and cutting all the costs it could (including marketing expenditures -- yikes!) Morale was decent but people were jumping off the ship whenever they got the chance. Pay was frozen (a big kick in the teeth to my efforts to grow my salary) and we had a couple rounds of letting people go (ugh, again.) Needless to say, this wasn't the best place to work.

But at this point I didn't have a lot of options. I was at the top of one of the best companies in our industry (believe it or not), so I didn't have many alternatives. In addition, I had gotten off the fast-track a bit as I had moved to progressively smaller companies and thus lost touch with many of the headhunters I knew a decade earlier. In addition, the current job had some advantages. It was low on the stress scale and didn't require as much work time as previous jobs I'd held, making it a nice job for my family life. Besides, I was making a good salary already, making much more than I needed, so I was by no means desperate for income. I must admit that I got a bit lazy during this time. While I did have some big accomplishments during this period, for the most part I was on auto-pilot career-wise.

This state of affairs lasted a couple years until our board got tired of the slow drip-drip-drip going out of our profits. They fired the company president and hired a "professional" executive, one with great credentials. Unfortunately, he had the same sort of personality as Maniac. And his past work experience? Marketing. Great. Just great. As you can imagine, my life got quite a bit more hectic. Almost overnight, a sleepy little job went into hyper mode. Now I not only had a frozen salary, but I was working like a fiend for a madman. Ugh.

I won't recount everything that happened over the subsequent two years, but here are some of the highlights:

• We had one change after another. As you can imagine, the new president did a complete company overhaul.

• Employees worked long hours, many of which were "busy" times spent chasing one rabbit or another for a president that knew he knew everything and no one else knew squat.

• I posted a few big wins/accomplishments during this time -- one that was so substantial that we made our annual bonuses. I was popular with my colleagues that year. :-)

A couple years into this, I had a real-life flashback. We had been given a profit number that was far out of our reach (like I'd received in the past). Like last time, our only chance was to swing for the fence and try a risky plan, but one that had at least some chance of getting us close. The president suggested I consult a marketing firm he'd used in the past and do whatever they suggested. I worked with them, and they came up with a plan that seemed reasonable -- at least it had a chance of succeeding. I presented it to the president as well as his right-hand man (who he'd brought in from his last company) and got it approved. Now, we just needed to execute the plan.

The short story is that we executed it alright, then it executed us -- the plan failed disastrously. Our sales tanked big-time and were down during our biggest time of the year. The board wasn't happy. Then, the unbelievable happened. The president and his #2 claimed that they had never agreed to "my" plan. They "forgot" that they had recommended the company that put the plan together. They "forgot" that I had shared the plan with them. They "forgot" that they had agreed to it. The only thing they "remembered" is that I had come up with a bad plan that was killing our company. Sure, I had advocated the plan as our only hope, but they had been in agreement and certainly given their approval. Otherwise, how could the plan have gone forward?

As you might imagine, it was a tough time for me. I was sure that I had a job since I had a one-year employment contract, but I wasn't sure what it would be. Then, a few startling events took place that made me move. I'll cover those next week. For now, here's what I learned from this job experience:

• Don't become complacent with your career. After years of managing my career actively, I found myself in a position where I had few career choices. I had become complacent with my career and was in a tough spot as a result. It's one reason I harp so much on the issue of actively managing your career -- I've seen the downside of not doing so and don't want any of you to be in the position I found myself in.

• Politics can be a killer. I had seen some pretty harsh company politics previously, but nothing like this. The blatant lying and denial from our top two executives (seeking to avoid any blame) was simply unbelievable. And since they had direct access to the board and I did not, who do you think the board was going to believe?

• An employment contract is invaluable -- so is keeping expenses down. I wasn't sure if they wanted to fire me or not, but if they did, they'd have to pay me a year's salary. I knew that I could stretch one year's pay to two or three years of living expenses simply because our spending was way below my salary level (one reason: my mortgage was paid off.) It was a very nice bit of security in a big storm and the one area that helped advance my career/compensation (as I was able to carry it into future job negotiations.)

Well, that's it for this time. Come back next week and see the twists and turns that lead to my next job.

Comments

[praveen]

Great Post.inspirational and learning lessons for us...keep going...

[Austin]

When getting approvals from supervisors is it possible (acceptable business practice) to get the details in writing? For example, signatures from the supervisors.

[FMF]

Austin --

That would have been a good idea in hindsight. But I never, ever would have expected them to deny knowledge of something we'd discussed in so much detail.

[Austin]

FMF

Thanks for answering my question. I was also thinking that some supervisors might become offended or irritated by the request that their approval would need to be in written form.

Man... office politics can be scary.

[Mike Hunt]

After it all went down did you go into their office and indirectly ask them if they were going to buy out your contract?

Seems like you should have been paid out given the course of events.

-Mike

[Sallie's Niece]

Wow, it sucks you got thrown under the bus like that. I can't wait to hear what happened next though.

[FMF]

Mike --

That might have been the option if I hadn't found the new job. (I could have asked to leave if they had reassigned me, then I could have been paid.) But the contract only went into effect if I was let go (not if I resigned, which I did.)

[Sandra Jensen]

Okay - I'm addicted - what happened next!?

[FMF]

Sandra --

Ha! Come back next Monday to see!!! ;-)

[Eric]

Not to accuse you of sensualizing at all, but this story was like a movie! Backstabbing office politics...it's scary to think about in real life.

[FMF]

Eric --

Tell me about it...

[Concojones]

Also looking forward to hearing the details!

Asking for written approval seems a bit over the top to me, but how come you didn't get access to the board? I've never been in this position, but I like to think I would have gotten my message to the board, no matter what. I would have MADE SURE they believed me, or at least got a status-quo.

[Concojones]

What's more, I don't see how a president can get away with supposedly not knowing what his chief of marketing is doing. The guy is responsible, for god's sake.

[funny about Money]

What an amazing saga! I can't wait to read the next installment. You should turn this into a book.

Your adventure with the lying bosses perfectly describes the reason I put everything related to proposals, decisions, and personnel matters in writing, even if it's only in e-mails. E-mails can and should be saved to disk and backed up. Universities are notorious for higher-ups finding ways to shaft the underlings...and deans often can pretty much do as they please.

Where personnel matters are concerned, an HR executive once advised me to keep a daily log of everything that takes place, even if nothing negative is happening. She suggested that when you're working with a difficult employee, it's as important to have evidence of smooth relations as it is to document problems. You could extend that to all aspects of a job, I suppose, on the theory that it's a good idea to have a written record of conversations, decisions, and actions taken (or not taken). Personally, I found I didn't have time to write every damfool thing down. But whenever I ran something past a dean, I did it by e-mail (or confirmed a face-to-face conversation with a "this is what I understand you want me to do" message) and kept a copy.

None of this ultimately prevented the university from closing our office and canning me and all four of my staff.

[James]

Are you planning to continue this series of posts about your past jobs? I can't wait to read more!

[FMF]

James --

Here you go:

http://www.freemoneyfinance.com/2009/09/my-jobs-the-summary.html

[Financial Samurai]

Tuff stuff FMF. At least you had your job contract and weren't fired in a jiffy for "your" bad plan!