A few days ago, the Daily Dilbert really resonated with me. They usually are pretty funny; and even funnier when you've directly experienced what Scott Adams is poking fun at.
When I read this, I was reminded of an experience I had while working at Lockheed. Lockheed had (and probably still has) a tradition of giving employees gifts on employment anniversaries. The one year gift was a nice pen with a fancy logo on it accompanied by a congratulatory letter.
Now, the thing that surprised me most about this gift was not the fact that we already had free pens available in our supply cabinet, but rather the contents of the letter. The letter was addressed directly to me from the Vice President of Engineering. And in it there was a personal invitation (quoted directly from the letter):
As your anniversary is recognized, I would like to take this opportunity to ask you for your honest and open feedback. Please take a moment to drop me a line with your comments and suggestions on ways we can improve our business and make our time spent at work more meaningful. These will help us in our pursuit of continuous improvement.
Quite honestly, she could have saved the $0.50 spent on the pen, and just sent the letter. The fact that she was directly asking for "honest and open feedback" was quite refreshing. Perhaps I was the only first year employee naive enough to think she was serious, but whether she expected it or not I was going to take her up on this offer.
You see, this was perfect timing. As long as I had worked for Lockheed, and likely much longer, shipping and receiving was a major bottleneck for quick and agile projects. If you placed an order through the proper channels you may get it in the next couple weeks, but more likely it would be more than a month!
We'd often call to check on the status of items and receive the same answer. Something along the lines of: "It is showing up as having been received, but we're really backed up and I don't know how long it will be until we find it and get it over to you."
Inevitably, this led to many workarounds from the formal system. Sometimes, we would find out when the item was going to arrive and then go pick it up ourselves. Or, we would simply order directly to our homes! But both of these options also presented problems due to security and other issues with procuring and moving property onto and around the facility. Smuggling is not a good solution.
Even though I understood that the VP of Engineering was probably already aware of this issue, I was still encouraged by the opportunity to get her first hand feedback on why it was not being addressed. It gave me hope that maybe she would have the power to press some buttons and get to the bottom of the problem -- the power that my boss lacked.
There was one small problem. Evidently she forgot to actually check if she had time to listen to the requested "honest and open feedback" before her secretary sent the letter.
It turns out I finally got an appointment to chat with her associate. Okay, that's fine, he was still at least four levels above me in the spaghetti of a corporate hierarchy and he could make things happen. He would have the power to push some buttons.
In the two weeks leading up to the meeting, I wasn't sitting on my hands. I was still actively involved in trying to figure out why it took so long to get things and how it might be fixed. Rather than trying to be a maverick, I was working together with my peers and my boss who was also well aware of the issue. His approach however was quite lax. Although he was open to discussion about it and said that he would try to resolve the issue, the actions he took sent a different message: that he'd dealt with this his entire career so why couldn't we; that it was just the way things were at a big defense company.
So I show up for the meeting and his secretary says he'll be there in a few minutes. That's fine, it gives me more time to check out his cool pictures of airplanes and the nice uni-directional screen cover on his monitor.
My first impression was that he was a really nice guy; that he actually really wanted to take the time to talk. After the niceties, we got down to business. I quickly talked through some of my first year impressions and then moved onto the issue that had been frustrating our team.
Everything was going well until I was done explaining the issue. You'll never guess how he responded. In a nutshell he said, "do you realize who you are talking to? Do you understand that I don't have time to deal with this and that you should have talked to your manager first?" He may as well have said from the start: "WHOA WHOA, you don't talk to me directly [about real issues]."
This after agreeing to meet and talk with me. This after explaining clearly to him the impact of the problem. That it was costing the company valuable time and money. That it was dulling the bleeding edge of his company. That we were ADP and it significantly impacted the agility of our projects.
In that moment I realized the curtain had been pulled back. I realized that he had just expressed what both he and his superior actually felt about first year employees.
But the story's not quite over. I have to reveal that a few weeks later the oddest thing happened. I received a call from the head of shipping and receiving. He was calling to check how they were doing. He wanted to see if things were going better and if there was anything he could do to speed things up.
If you don't subscribe to the Daily Dilbert, you should.