Bottom-Line Types Get To Scrape Bottom

Will we never learn that what goes around, comes around? Probably not, as shown in a recent Forbes magazine article. It seems that big corporations are desperately trying to find some way to build a quality in their work force that is too scarce nowadays.

It is called loyalty. The question isn’t just how to find good, qualified, high-IQ workers. It is the far tougher question of how do corporate bosses keep those scarce, vital, top-skill employees from jumping ship in the blink of an eye to any other employer willing to beat the pay and perks they get now? For industries that must have brain power on staff or die, it is a puzzlement how to keep the troops loyal.

But business brass shouldn’t be surprised that loyalty is hard to find. Not too long ago, the workers that the brass freely declared were their most loyal - older, long-service employees - also were the ones most likely to get the chop. For years, that loyalty quality was devalued in the workplace by the cutting-edge, with-it managers. Now, with the labor market getting tight and high-intelligence workers hard to find - and harder still to keep - many corporations are reaping in the 1990s what they sowed in the 1980s.

Older employees, whose long service and demonstrated loyalty to the firm always got big lip service from the management, were being dumped nevertheless on all sides. Lip service or not, neither service nor loyalty counted as pluses.

The 1980s brought the new viewpoint that older employees aren’t strengths or assets but expensive liabilities that the shrewd, hard-nosed executive gets rid of. There is sad irony in the fact that personnel departments took up the human resources tag just as many top managements seemed to decide older workers were neither humans nor resources but costs.

Note the big firm whose chief executive officer, according to a class-action suit, ordered a 20-40-60 liquidation formula for dumping workers. Anybody with 20 years’ service, a salary over 40 grand or age over 60 got the ax. The suit still is in the courts, but the settlement should be a lulu. And the damage done to the company and its people by the callous CEO, now himself fired, was massive and lasting.

In all those downsizings, right-sizings, re-engineerings and other such euphemized operations, the justification by the hard-nosed was built on the old we must be cruel to be kind line. Which suggested that those excusing themselves hadn’t read the play from which the line is taken. The chap saying that got himself stabbed by the recipient of the cruelty so described. Mass firings are viewed on the shop floor and in the cubicles, both by the canned and those who survive, as being cruel to be cruel.

Some of the cruel-to-be-kind terminations might have been devised by a corporate Torquemada. Like the Texas firm that closed down a department by having security men cut locks off the victims’ lockers on Sunday and hand the fired workers garbage bags containing their personal effects on the parking lot as they arrived, unsuspecting, for work Monday. It is unlikely that the outfit ever again will be able to earn loyalty from its workers. You can be sure everyone who has worked at that firm for a week knows the story.

The sour but popular Dilbert comic strip’s success is based in part on that sort of atrocity and the cynicism that has resulted. But even more serious is that poll showing better than four of 10 male graduates and three of 10 females of the college class of 1997 want and plan to go into business for themselves. Why do those best-and-brightest kids want to dare the risky course alone rather than joining a big corporation? Job security, they told the pollsters.

Secure jobs used to be a reason why the young comers of the World War II and Silent Generations joined big firms. But too many of those firms in recent years, once the employees no longer were young, dumped them on the bricks in late career. When, that is, they were most vulnerable to age bias in finding new jobs and when family obligations were peaking.

Downsizing is a learning experience not only for the elder downsized but also for their families. Those victims of age discrimination had children, nieces, nephews and grandchildren who watched their career disasters up close. Any wonder they distrust corporations and the big promises of recruiters? Small wonder the work force is full of job hoppers who just laugh at the old one-for-all-and-all-for-one, team spirit line. Loyalty, it appears, can’t be turned on and off from the top. It must be built over time on mutual trust, and the chainsaw bosses chainsawed that to chips years ago.

Many modern managers never learned what every corporal and petty officer used to learn the first day of NCO school. Until they learn that simple but vital restatement of the Golden Rule, they aren’t likely to rise from manager to the more effective role of leader:

If you don’t give loyalty TO your people, you don’t get loyalty FROM them.

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