Are You Teflon, or Gold?

Earlier in my HR career, a new senior manager was referred and recruited by one of our newer senior executives.

The manager, whom I'll call Teflon (the name is changed to protect the guilty), immediately made a big splash with his aggressive tactics.  He was an equal-opportunity asshole, beating the crap out of his vendors, his new colleagues and his new team of employees. He got the best price (in the short term) from his vendors, and he leveraged his senior executive mentor to finger-point cross-functionally and consistently across the organization to further pad his bonus potential by driving down any cross-functional costs that might impact his area.  Of course, this drove up costs in other areas of the organization.

He was a recruiter's nightmare.  I can recall at least 3 candidates who declined to work for the organization because of Teflon's prisoner-of-war interview tactics with them.   "That guy is a lunatic,"  one candidate memorably related.  "I like your organization, but I can't work for him."   Teflon then complained how we weren't filling his jobs quickly enough.  I know you're shocked.  

Whenever Teflon was challenged, he went aggressively postal and blamed his accuser(s) back, loudly and profanely.  Nothing was ever his fault, he was always right.  Teflon's often irrational belief that he was always right was so ingrained in his reality that he was deeply and genuinely hurt by the attacks of his colleagues in response to his attacks.  I once spent an hour in a conference room with him, reluctantly and incredulously offering my maternal HR shoulder as he cried bitterly at the unfairness of it all, drowning his sorrows in his own Kool-Aid.

Teflon's initial coup de grace, however, was how he nailed one of his subordinates for taking bribes in the form of free goodies from vendors. Teflon alerted Internal Control, and sure enough, Teflon was right.  Teflon's subordinate was promptly fired, mortified at being caught.  But apparently not mortified enough to not take bribes in the first place.

How did Teflon know?  As it was discovered later, he had in all likelihood accepted bribes himself periodically during the course of his career and recognized the behavior.  At least, this was the likely conjecture, as Teflon was eventually terminated for cooking his numbers to drive up his bonus.

Now this cautionary tale is on the extreme end of the scale.  However, it forever soured me on employees / managers / executives / colleagues who finger-point, whine and make excuses instead of manning-up / womanning-up, taking responsibility and proactively offering collaborative solutions.  And those in organizational control who condone or even worse, encourage such behavior.

Seriously:  my 9 year-old is more solution-oriented and takes more responsibility (and is extremely hard on himself, interesting how genetics play out) than some of the adults I've witnessed in the workplace.

It's particularly disturbing to witness managers engage in this teflon behavior.  "My (subordinate) screwed up the order," instead of "It's my responsibility, and this is how I'm going to work with my team to fix it."

And when it happens on an organizational scale, you start to feel like Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight:  is this really happening?  Who's the crazy one here? 

Which is one of the reasons I love Get Rid of the Performance Review! by Culbert and Rout.  No more finger-pointing power plays or whining self-victimization:  the performance of both the manager and their team is inextricably dependent and success or failure is a joint responsibility.  Which is organizational and bottom-line gold.

So what will you mine this week to drive mutual / bottom-line success:  teflon, or gold?