Well, I am 9 days into business school and already fitting that profile of the fully exhausted Grad student. But, unlike some of my peers I still have that good old day job to go to, and this week the day job was more interesting than usual...
This past week, in the midst of slaving away at work, an all-day meeting was scheduled. It turns out that our regional VP and HR guy wanted to come talk to all of us about a recent employee survey that was conducted.
Rewind... This was a basic anonymous survey with questions like, "do you have the tools you need to do your job?", "does your manager support you?", "would you recommend your company to a friend?", etc. etc. Well, I took the opportunity to inject some truth including a full page of comments about all of the issues that bothered me. In fairness I included some of the more recent positive changes as well.
OK, back to the meeting... We split into two groups... senior and junior managers- I am the latter. When the powerpoint fired up with the response graphs and comments I quickly discovered that I was one of the only people that had left comments. In fact, 70%-80% of the comments on the screen were mine. This was a little concerning at first, but as the HR guy (our moderator) started walking through them, people began to open up.
One person agreed with my comment about upward opportunity. Another one began to elaborate on the micromanagement we all endure. A third person echoed my thoughts on the desire to get involved outside the operation (side projects). A fourth person discussed the centralized decision making - and the lack of junior level manager involvement. This went on for two hours! We went through the negative and the positive - I felt such a huge amount of relief. I wasn't crazy... I was just the only one speaking up.
After our productive discussion, the two groups came back together. The next step was to present a summarized version of our comments to the senior managers and vice-versa. As expected, the senior managers began to ask for specifics and this is where the conversation broke down. No one was about to stand up and say, "yeah, so last week when you were micromanaging me...". It just isn't realistic. So, our Senior Director, who is very intuitive, brought the meeting to a close and thanked everyone for their time.
A strange ending to the day, but early this week (a week later) an e-mail came out from the senior director outlining the formation of teams to breakthrough the issues the junior managers brought up. What an amazing thing. We were listened to and changes are already starting to occur.
I feel like this is an important sequence of events that I will remember long into my career. I guess you don't learn everything in business school.
