Does Your Boss Meddle in Your Business?

 

by Glenn Shepard

April 6, 2010

 

 
Galesburg, IL April 20
Kenosha, WI April 21
Waukesha, WI April 22
Sheboygan, WI April 23
   

Call Rebecca at 1-800-538-4595 for any location.

“I hire people brighter than me and then get out

of their way. ”

 

— Lee Iacocca
 

Dear Glenn,   

   Loved your article on the perfume and have had this personally happen to me where the perfume was so heavy I could not breathe.

      So, now help me out on the opposite.

      What about the smelly person that everyone complains about because of lack of hygiene?

Pam in Omaha

 

Dear Pam,

      There's no easy way to have this unpleasant conversation. Have it in private, at the end of the day, and don't candy coat it.

     Be careful about assuming that body odor is because of poor hygiene.

     If an employee claims it's because of a medical condition (such as  trimethylaminuria, which produces a fishy smell in the sweat), they may be protected under the ADA.

      There can also be a racial component.

      Asians have fewer apocrine glands than Caucasians, so they sweat less.        

       Caucasians have fewer apocrine glands than people of African decent, so white people sweat less than black people.

      (Someone will have a hissy fit and send nasty emails screaming racism because I said this, but it's a medical fact).

     So talk to HR before you have the conversation.

     Thanks for your question.

Glenn in Nashville, TN

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Glenn's Personal  Blog

Click on the gold pen to see what Glenn's on a rant about now

In last week’s open call in day, one of our Gold Inner Circle members who I’ll call Roberta, explained that the president of her company sometimes walks through her department and gets involved with little things he understands nothing about.

For example, he thought her employees should be able to file claims online in “two to three minutes”, when it actually takes 30 to 45 minutes. He suggested she needed to “crack the whip” on them.

The problem isn’t her employees, it’s her president.

He doesn’t have much immediate knowledge of how her department works because the company he founded decades ago has grown so much, and this is not uncommon.

In last week’s episode of Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, former Illinois governor Rob Blagojevich couldn’t figure out how to type on a laptop computer. He explained that he always had people who took care of that kind of thing. (I predict he'll have plenty of time to learn how to use a computer in the near future.)

In a recent episode of Gene Simmons Family Jewels, multi-millionaire businessman and rock star Simmons couldn’t get his printer to print. Eventually, he discovered the problem was that he hadn’t turned it on.

The higher up people move, the less in touch they are with what happens on the front lines. The TV show Undercover Boss is based on this one fact.

Roberta’s problem is not that she needs to crack the whip, it’s that she needs to draw the line – with her boss.

It’s just as wrong for the president of the company to break the chain of command by getting too involved with what front-line employees are doing on a daily basis, as it would be for those front-line employees to go over the supervisor’s head and run straight to the president on a daily basis.

Even though it’s his company, the tiny details of what his front-line employees are doing on a daily basis are not his business. That’s what he hired managers to take care of.

As long as the job’s getting done and the results are satisfactory, he has to trust those managers to do their jobs, and stay out of their way.

Over the 22 years I’ve owned this company, there've been times when it struggled, and times when it prospered. The times when it struggled were the times when I tried to do everything, be everything, and control everything.

The times when it prospered have always been the times when I surrounded myself with the best people, and then got out of their way.

So how do you tell your boss this without crossing a line yourself?

Leave a copy of this issue on his or her desk. You can make me out to be the bad guy.

 

Dedicated To Your Success,

Glenn Shepard

 

 

 

 

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