Another screw-up? You’re promoted!

It took three years for upper management to squeeze out the lemon they’d hired

Two mergers ago, the CFO of the company I worked for hired a new Director of IT, who would report to the CFO. The new IT director (let’s call him Griff) had a command-and-control style of management and liked to use manufacturing analogies to describe everything. He soon began irritating the executive board, terrorizing staff, and alienating vendors. He buried the staff in so much admin work that we couldn’t get much done. What we could get done was never good enough, and everything was always someone else’s fault.

He was what is commonly referred to as a “seagull” manager: fly in, make a lot of noise, crap all over everything, then leave.

At one meeting with a vendor in which Griff commented that he did not believe in courting a relationship with any particular vendor.

After the meeting, the vendor phoned me to ask “what is up with this guy?” I explained that he was relatively new to this company, but the vendor declined any further involvement with the project. Then I told Griff about the call (I figured he was entitled to know for future interaction with this vendor).

While I sat in his office, Griff called the vendor and bullied him into another meeting. That next meeting was no better, and afterwards the vendor called the president of the division directly to say he wanted nothing more to do with the project. The president then called Griff, he called me, and nobody was happy.

He took me off the project — accusing me of poor communication skills — blamed me for the whole thing, and handled the rest of it himself. Lots of money was spent, and to nobody’s surprise, the final product didn’t last long. Unfortunately, Griff was to last a little longer.

And on the one-year anniversary of Griff’s employment, after an absolutely abysmal performance, he was promoted to VP.

This caused a major uproar at every level — particularly among the other VPs. How could such a travesty have happened? We found out later that he had been promised this promotion as an incentive for taking the job when he’d been hired.

Griff continued to fire those he didn’t like, plotting (and failing I might add) to eliminate long-time and well-entrenched employees, using racial epithets when referring to non-Caucasians (never in public, only with those he thought were like-minded), exhibiting a patronizing attitude toward the ladies on the executive board, and generally treating everyone like ants at his personal picnic. The company lost many good people (including a number of managers) during that time, either voluntarily or via Griff’s hatchet.

The company hired an executive coach to work with Griff on his management skills. He’d get expensive coaching and then go back to mistreating his staff. After 3 years, 10 months, 2 weeks and 4 days, even the executive team had had enough.

The combination of an internal survey, the sheer number of people (from the top down) who wanted to see him gone, his negative and contradictory reviews of his managers, the fact that there was no improvement from his time with the executive coach, and the decimation of the IT staff and, in the process, IT productivity, eventually caught up with him. The day finally arrived when he was “encouraged” to clean out his desk and leave immediately.

It was noble of the company to keep its promise to Griff, but did it justify the pain the rest of us had to endure? Nobody I know thinks so. In fact, every year, on the anniversary of Griff’s dismissal, there is a happy hour in honor of his departure. Many employees from those days (not just IT) participate. I wonder how long they’ll continue.