Company Man

Does a middle manager have no power or does s/he have actually all the power? Let's define terms first: by "middle manager" what I mean is someone tasked with actually supervising production-level employees, not junior vice-presidents who get paid to flow-chart; the level of management literally in the middle, between the people who expense their lunches and those who microwave them. Actual managers, higher-level managers, the ones who manage other managers, are both required and limited to think strategically, by their job descriptions and by the insulation between what they plug in to spreadsheets and the day-to-day worklife of the people who make/do the things that populate their carefully color-coded rows and columns. No matter how actually open the orientation-day insisted-upon "open door policy" is in practice, their realm is by definition abstraction reliant upon their full faith and credit in their direct-reports.

The middle managers, people like myself, are kind of the only ones allowed to think and act tactically. And not only allowed but often required to as the job demands short-term responses to immediate problems, which one might make an effort to plug back into a larger corporate context at a later date once the crisis has passed in an ideal world. But look, sometimes the 1997 HP Laserjet shoots blue toner powder all down the pleated front of someone's Dockers and you're forced to commit to losing a few hours of production so the poor bastard can go home and change his indefensible* trousers, to can spare him the indignity of having to deflect the most obvious of suppositions of his co-workers in a situation like this: an attack of acute porphyria. Everyone remembers George III. There's still a stigma.

This is just an all-too-common example of the kind of thing that the higher-ups, considering orderly numbers and the cold cruelty of cost-effectiveness, would likely squirm at in the face of an unrecoverable surrender of countable widgets for that reporting period.  But the middle managers--people like me, the ones stuck looking at people with their faces and everything--are down swimming in the soupy miasma of sticky human feeling. It's difficult to be bloodless when everything around you is bone and working muscle, sinew and coursing blood.

So when it comes right down to it, in the rare cases where an actual crisis occurs involving an actual employee with actual feelings, the decision-making gets complicated in a whooshing rush when you know the consequences of the response are going to blast out in a shockwave, the size of which you may be able to limit within a range of intensity but almost never defuse, that's going to shake some shit up, if not knock a few things over. I hate to be too vague here but really the details don't matter: today I was presented with an interesting choice between the corporate (in both meanings) interests and the interests of two people--my people. Standing up for individuals might have meant jeopardizing the standing of the rest of the group in the eyes of my bosses or perhaps even in the eyes of the further-up corporate masters we contract for. I could protect a couple of people in a concrete way in a very specific circumstance or I could protect all the people from a vague and possible matrix of meaningful consequence.

In the end it's something of a false choice, though. The failure to protect one is the same as the failure to protect everyone, at least if the choices are honest ones.** If my people are in positions where they feel threatened or harassed, I can't ask someone to suck it up, take one for the team so as not to cause a ruckus, can I? Or maybe it's more selfish. Maybe I'm the one unwilling to take one for the team by swallowing my dumb conscience and doing what would make the most sense in the Benthamite, utilitarian view, at the risk of giving myself the workplace sads?

In the end, by sheer good luck in this case, it didn't come to quite so stark a choice. I will say that if it had, I'm in a position to make trouble. Real trouble. The one thing any corporate leadership hates more than anything else is the insistence on adherence to the black-and-white wording of its actual policies, even (especially?) in the case of protecting their actual workers. As tedious as the many webinars or guest lectures are that they might make you take about corporate ethics, company internet use policy, equal opportunity hiring or sexual harassment, when something goes down, I'm finding that there's a head-snappingly quick reversion to an old male-energy culture of "why are people being so goddamned sensitive all the time? See if you can make them shut up and stop being such babies." The webinars and lectures, you realize, aren't there because anyone believes in any of that equality and zero-tolerance shit, it's all about indemnification against a lawsuit. Wanna get something moving, I mean really moving? Point out how a conversation with your superiors is beginning to shade into territory that doesn't quite reconcile with Section 4, Subparagraph Whatever of the latest version of the employee handbook. The feet that were initially dragging you'll find now hardly touch the ground as they lope forward, like gazelles spooked by the scent of lions. Litigious lions.

This is part of the reason why I blog anonymously, so I can talk about the trouble I might make without any real fear of repercussions. Well, that and because I want to make jokes about Shailene Woodley's vagina without worrying about what my mom would think.

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*Both pre- and post-toner

**Honest in the specific context of company policy and state and federal labor law. Not actual honesty. I'm not 5.