Humans at Work

The last year I worked for Ben & Jerry's Homemade, I was supervised by a woman who destroyed my faith in my skill, intelligence, and competence. She raged at fellow employees in front of me. She called me in to meetings and tore me apart, with the curtains open wide on the conference room so everyone who passed by could see her pacing and gesticulating, and see me white-faced and terrified. She left me without direction, and then reviled (and sometimes reversed) my decisions. Fortunately, I was already planning to leave the company, but she made my last six months a living hell. It took me several years to recover my confidence.

(This was not typical at Ben & Jerry's, by the way. For the first five years of my tenure, I had a manager who gave me enormous levels of support and helped me learn to be a good leader. Overall, I experienced Ben & Jerry's as taking care of the people who worked there in myriad ways. Rather than saying anything terrible about Ben & Jerry's, this story illustrates that even in the best companies, where people really are valued, bad leadership can destroy productivity and damage people.)

Through her new organization, Humans at Work, Kelley Eskridge wants to make this kind of behavior (and a whole host of less egregious but equally destructive ones) obsolete in business. For this, as well as for her remarkable fiction, she is one of my heroes.

I speak not only as a former employee struggling to maintain my sense of myself and do work I could be proud of in the face of bad management. As a young manager, I would have given anything for the training Eskridge is offering. With Eskridge, I believed that:

Work is a human thing, the product of human brains, human muscles, human spirits, human hearts. And so work, like the humans who do it, can be awkward and exciting and scary and sometimes messy. And it has the human potential for joy, if business would only make room for it.
(from A Leader's Manifesto)

In my twenties, I just didn't have the skills I needed to make it work that way. I was inconsistent. I sent mixed messages. I made arbitrary decisions. I got in the way of the work. Not on purpose, of course—I was always reaching toward a different way of managing. I always wanted to do a good job by the folks I worked with and by the work itself. In most cases, that vision saved me from being a terrible manager, but I could have done much better—and that knowledge weighed me down and made me less effective. I came by my skills the hard way, over years. Eskridge's expertise could have made the learning so much easier, and made me effective so much earlier.

Kelley Eskridge is a wisdom entrepreneur. She wants to make a big change in the world, a change that will outlast her. She has the wisdom and the capacity to make it happen. She has created a remarkable business model that makes her expertise available to businesses (in the form of a turnkey program that they can use as is or adapt) for free, as well as offering consulting for a price. From reading her fiction and her blog over years, I know that she is a community-builder at heart. I can't wait to see where Humans at Work goes.

You go, Kelley. We'll be watching, and cheering you on.

Comments

[Kelley Eskridge]

Beth, thank you so much for this lovely, generous support! I appreciate it very much.

Your Boss From Hell story... ah, I feel for you. I've been there too. It's a soul-sucking experience. And so common -- I don't think I've ever met a working person who doesn't have at least one such story.

And I was a pretty bad manager myself at first -- great intentions and an utter lack of meaningful skills.

I really do believe that managing well isn't magic. It's a set of behaviors that anyone can learn to do better. I hope that the information available in Humans At Work will persuade people to try. Managing is way too important a job to be random.

Thanks again for the support. My best to all of you at A Bigger Voice.

[Beth Wallace]

Hi Kelley! Thanks for taking the time to come over and comment. I think I'm excited about Humans at Work in part because there are so many people like us who really want to do good work, and spend a lot of time bumbling around trying to figure out how. That wastes energy and time just as dealing with inept management does.

I remember clearly the point at which I realized that in early childhood settings, teachers needed the same kind of support and environment that I wanted them to provide for children--time to explore, room to make mistakes, clear boundaries and a lot of freedom within them, interesting questions to research, room to acknowledge and experience their feelings... It was amazing how the climate of the Children's Center changed, for adults and for children, as I became more and more competent at creating that space for the teachers. And that translated directly into the demand for space in the Children's Center; it had a huge impact on the bottom line.

In business, customers are at the end of the same chain. Everything that happens along it affects their experience, directly or indirectly.

It makes me want to jump up and shout to think of other people not having to go through all the agony I did, wanting so badly to do my job well and not knowing how--the moments where something worked but I didn't know why, the moments where it all fell apart, and I didn't know why. The story about my boss from hell is a good hook, but the hope I see for young managers in your work is even more compelling.

I'll look forward to hearing more as it all unfolds.

[Ellen Ingraham]

Hi Beth and Kelley,

I heard about Humans at Work from Beth, and when I went to your website I couldn't stop reading! What a complement to you and your work. As a former manager in the Pharma industry, I can tell you that is one industry that could truly use your expertise. However, as you both said, manager's from hell are everywhere.

The one thing I did know when I became a manager is that I wanted to do something different than those that had managed me. It was my favorite job, and I hired, developed and promoted many. We always did great work with great results AND had a lot of fun doing it.

When you speak about the learning curve when new at management, I used many of the principles from "First, Discover Your Strengths" and the "Platinum Rule" to speed up my learning curve. They both taught me how to manage people the way THEY want to be managed, find their sweet spots, let them do more of what they loved and bring everything else up to "meets expectations". To build a great team, celebrate everyone strengths and accomplishments; encourage individuals to teach what they know, and ask for help when needed. Have a lot of laughs together. So simple to institute, but so rare to find.

I emailed the link to Human at Work to my former CEO with a rave review - I hope he can take the time to read it and even better, institute it. As Beth said, when management improves, so does the bottom line. And while that's happening, people enjoy their jobs, feel like they are making a difference, contribute and gain recognition in the areas they are best at, and consequently are loyal to their companies. What a concept!

Kelley, I look forward to following your success. Please let me know if I can help in any way! We at A Bigger Voice enjoy spreading the word of Wisdom Entrepreneurs.