I have personally seen long time employees become bitter, complaining, cancers, after 22 years on the job.
"RaiderPride" wrote:
So have I. And sometimes it has been because management has screwed up. Organizations and the quality of their culture can be fragile places. And sometimes the "great places to work" are the most fragile. Especially if those great places are also places where the management is top down in a big way.
There are two kinds of questions involved here:
1. Whether the Wood dude deserved what he got or not.
2. Whether the Packer organization is handling the Wood case correctly or not.
Part of #2 is "should they have fired him?" But only part. Part of it is managing the individual worker correctly. But part of it is managing the organization correctly. And if you're going to manage in a hierarchical way, the latter means people above Wood AND people in public positions (which includes McCarthy even if he isn't in Wood's chain of command) paying attention to how they speak publicly.
If you're in a position of influence, and McCarthy is, words have consequences. Yeah, in a perfect world, we'd have better journalism and fans not getting on his case about things they shouldn't get on his case about. But we don't live in a perfect world; and Mike, if he wants to get the big bucks, needs to do better. And, more importantly, the Packer hierarchy needs to do better.
People usually don't just "become cancers" overnight. They do so for a reason. Sometimes that is because something else in their lives has gone pear-shaped, or because something in their brain (serotonin uptake or whatever). And sometimes that reason is because they've been around long enough to see the organization becoming a different kind of place to work, and because they've invested a large part of their lives and themselves in the "old place", a place that "current management" has fucked with.
IF there's just one instance of "bitterness", it's a good bet that its something outside the organization that is the problem. But if there's more than one, it's a better bet that there's something wrong internally. And each example doesn't just increase the probability that the problem is organization, it increases it at an increasing rate.
Especially when you have a organization whose identity has for a long time been built around "family" or "community" notions. All organizations talk about being those things, but some places actually are that way.
But don't stay that way. And while those "inside" know it isn't the same as it used to be, the public image as a "special place" can persist for some time.
If I might be permitted an analogy: it's easy to see how dysfunctional the Raiders organization is....now. And it's easy to see that it's been that way for awhile now. But here's a question: when did it become so?
I can't answer that question. I'm not only outside of the Raiders organization, I really don't care a whole lot about the answer enough to look at the history. But I'm pretty sure that it was dysfunctional well before anyone started to notice and at a time when people outside were still talking about it being a "special organization".
Were this the only example of a disgruntled employee, I wouldn't be worried. Were this the only example of management speak and bad public handling of a disgruntled employee, I wouldn't be worried. Heck even if it were just this and the Voldemort example, I wouldn't be particularly bothered. But it isn't just one or two isolated examples any more.
And that does trouble me.
A lot.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)