AnnMaria's Blog

Here is my own Susie Sainte story for the day.

Susie had been at her new job for just over a year. Employees received 12 days of vacation the first year and 12 sick days. Guess what? Everyone was sick exactly 12 times each year.

As the end of her first year approached, Susie mentioned to her co-worker, Joe, that she had 12 days of sick leave and would start losing sick days if she did not use them by next year. Joe said,

"You must be stupid. Haven't you noticed that everyone takes one day of sick leave a month? Even the boss takes his 12 days a year!"

Talking to her cousin, Sam, she received the same advice,

"Why on earth wouldn't you take your sick days? Those are yours. You get those because you are a good employee and they want to keep you happy. It's not because they love you. Take next Monday off."

Susie decided that they were right. She had been working very hard lately and she was going to stay home from work next Monday. When she came in on Thursday to find that both Joe and her boss had called in sick, she was even more determined to 'quit being a sucker' as Joe called it. She even planned to get some shopping done.

Thursday night, her young son asked if he could stay home from school the next day to play with his new video game. Susie said,

"No. You're not sick. If I tell the teacher you're sick, that's lying. If you go back to school on Monday and say you were sick, that's lying. Lying is wrong."

Saturday morning, Susie was visiting with her dad and asked  him what he thought about taking sick leave. He put his coffee down, leaned back and said,

"Well, when I retired, I had 39 days of sick leave left. They were good to me so why would I want to &*!@ them over? What difference does it make if everyone else in the place is taking sick leave when they're not sick? That's their choice. You need to make your own choice. I got paid enough to take care of you kids. I had my vacation time. If I got sick, I took my sick leave. Why would I lie and take advantage of a policy? My sick leave was there if I needed it but I was lucky enough to be healthy.  Over the years, those other guys, they ended up getting two day suspensions here and there, getting written up, getting fired.  Remember when your grandma was sick? I said I needed two weeks to go to take care of her and when she passed on I called and said I needed another week and my boss just said to come back when I was ready. If you do right, people do right by you. Even if they don't, it's all about what kind of person you want to be."

Monday, as Susie was leaving for lunch, she happened to look over at Joe's empty desk. He was out sick again. On the way out, she stuck her head in the boss's office,

"Would it be all right if I come back a little late from lunch? My son just got a perfect attendance award and I promised to run into town and buy him another one of those video games he's crazy about."

The boss waved,

"Don't worry about it. Things are slow here. Take the afternoon off.I can manage by myself."

Leaving the building, Susie was thinking her dad would be proud of her and patting herself on the back for being a good example to her son. And Joe? She wasn't thinking of him at all.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[Over a year ago, Erich wrote a blog on self-honesty/ self-awareness. He asked why, when most tribal members clearly know right from wrong do they engage in unethical behavior. He argued that part of it is unethical environments. When you see everyone coming in late, and it is hard for you to get up in the morning yourself, you start sleeping in. You have a lot of personal tasks to get completed (who doesn't) and everyone else takes an hour or two for lunch instead of half an hour. Why not you? It's a slippery slope. Initially, you compare yourself to others and say I'm ethical, I'm not like Joe who comes in an hour late and takes a two-hour lunch' Be careful because a few years from now people may be justifying their behavior by comparing themselves to you!

Where does this apply to board members? The new board comes in and they have friends who want positions, who want favors. There are people who have 'done them wrong' in the past and this is a chance to get even.

Why is this new president telling them they can't do that? Why did John get to put his friends in positions and give them favors and now that I am  a board member and my friends are much better and more qualified people than John's, you're telling me that I can't put them into positions? John paid his way to Hawaii from board funds and you want me to pay my own hotel room for the board meeting off site. How unfair is that?

Is it any wonder that soon the people who voted for us are saying that nothing has changed? The key is, as Erich points out, relentless self-honesty.

Here is an example from today. A board member, let's call her Louise, had continually been disparaging the director of a project, "Sam", and there had been other issues. When I mentioned to Sam some of  what Louise had been doing, Sam directed her to follow the chain of command and not take action without his approval. Louise was furious with me and said a lot of things I thought were pretty unnecessary. When I spoke to Erich about this he asked,

"Why didn't you just talk to Louise yourself?"

I replied,

"I did, so many times I am tired of it. This has been going on for a long time with her trying to undermine Sam."

Erich said,
"Then, the reason you did what you did wasn't necessarily that it was the right thing to do but because YOU were tired of dealing with Louise. So, maybe Louise is right to be mad at you. Maybe the right thing to do was to keep dealing with Louise even though you are tired of her. It sounds like a lack of perseverance on your part."

I started to protest that Sam had not deserved the lack of support from Louise but Erich cut me off with a story...

"I watched a movie once where these prisoners ended up mixed in with a group of rich people. One of the prisoners asked,
'We're bad people. We're supposed to act like this. What's your excuse?'

My point is that we have to show the proper respect and consideration even toward people who might be behaving badly at the moment. Talking behind someone's back, subverting the chain of command, ignoring policies and procedures - none of those things a person might do makes it okay for YOU not to confront the person directly, deal with him or her fairly and try to resolve the conflict. The hell of it is that person probably won't appreciate it and may be just as mad at you as if you had not continued to try to treat her fairly. That's not the point. The point is you have to treat everyone right. If it was a friend of yours, if it was me, would you have been too tired of dealing with it or would you have approached me yourself?"

RELENTLESS self-honesty. When someone hollers at you at a board meeting or outside of one, when people attack you, ignore the venom, ignore the shouting and try to honestly answer whether somewhere in there you are completely blameless. If you are at fault, try to fix it and if you can't fix it at least try to do better in the future.

I asked a very experienced board president who I admire if he had any advice for a new president or chair. He said,

"When you have won a victory it is time for you to be magnanimous."

Generosity. That's one of the four Dakota virtues Erich stresses in his ethics courses. In the book, The Genius of Sitting Bull, 13 Heroic Strategies for Today's Business Leaders, the authors state that Sitting Bull was a "healer", not in the medical sense but in the sense of healing conflicts among their people. They state,

"Leaders bestow beneficence, generosity and compassion upon their people. "

The first lesson, then, for a new board president is not to "out to get" those who voted against you.

• Don't publicly embarrass them. Be honest with yourself, were you opponents really evil, incompetent people, or did they just want the same job as you? If they have good qualities your organization could use, emphasize that. Thank your supporters but don't disparage those who supported your competition.
• If a person is qualified for a job, put him in it, whether he supported you or someone else.
• Try to see the other person's point of view.

In a really interesting blog on generosity of spirit, Seraphine mentions the tendency in any conflict situation to focus on how others have hurt us and forget that there is more than enough hurt to go around. In fact, since your opponents lost, they are likely hurting more than you.

Seraphine resolves to "think the best of other people's intentions .. Even if their decisions are problematic or hurtful, I want my first assumption to be that they had a reason for what they did that seemed important. "

Following her advice has already helped me a little, in that I don't respond immediately to people who attack me as board president. I do try to understand their point of view and why they have taken such a position.

The next step is to follow Sitting Bull's model of healing the divisions within the group. That step, I think, is going to be harder.