ChampionTexan
Hall of Fame
I know that "If things happened in sports like they did in the real world..." examples are usually a bunch of crap, and this one may be too, but consider this.
You've been hired to turnaround a dept. of a major company that has suffered from it's creation with inept management. There are former employees that have been terminated due to cause, but because of legal reasons, they are still on the payroll. While you pretty much have full hiring and firing authority, you are on a budget, and those terminated folks still count against it. As time goes on, those terminated employees will begin dropping off the books, but you'll need to manage with both an eye towards bringing in top-notch folks, and not recreating the budget hell the previous management had gotten themselves into. Oh yeah - hiring in your field is incredibly competitive, between you and the other departments within your company virtually all of the folks quailified to work in your field already work for your company. You add college graduates to the workforce every year, but those folks are spread around the company evenly, and all departments will receive a relatively equal share of those folks. While folks in the other departments do periodically transfer within the company, your predecessors left your department with a reputation that will make it...let's just say challenging... to attract the best and the brightest. You do have excellent facilities, and your department is considered pretty employee friendly.
Your performance is pretty much based 100% on annual productivity as compared to the other depts in your company. As you can imagine, things are in a pretty sorry shape when you start, so the good news is the bar is pretty low. You've also been told you should focus on long-term productivity, not just a quick turnaround that will only result in temporary/unsustainable improvement. The first year, you pick the low-hanging fruit and triple productivity. While you've improved productivity by 200%, you are still in the bottom 30% on a company-wide basis. A clear cut improvement, but still a ways to go for that promotion. In year 2, you see a productivity jump of 33% from the previous year. While this isn't nearly the percentage increase of year one, only 40% (approximately) of the other departments have better productivity than you. You're still not where you want to be, but you feel good about the direction and progress of the first two years.
Year 3 rolls around, and while you are struggling to identify and correct the reason, productivity is down in a major way the first month and a half of the year. Through mid-February, everything that was a problem in the past still seems to be a problem, and some things that weren't problems before now are. For reasons your working to identify and fix, things seem to have reverted back to where they were before you got there. You recognize that there's still 10.5 months left in the year, and while you've made it tougher on yourself, you still have enough time to continue the upward movement you've started. There is some reason to believe that the first month and a half are far tougher months to produce in than most. Before you have a chance to finish February (much less the first quarter of the year), your boss calls you into his office, tells you that while your performance in the first two years were solid and encouraging, your 1+ month performance has convinced him that you're the problem, and in spite of the first two years performance, he's convinced that you are incapable of even re-creating the productivity you achieved in year two, much less improving on it.
How do you feel?
You've been hired to turnaround a dept. of a major company that has suffered from it's creation with inept management. There are former employees that have been terminated due to cause, but because of legal reasons, they are still on the payroll. While you pretty much have full hiring and firing authority, you are on a budget, and those terminated folks still count against it. As time goes on, those terminated employees will begin dropping off the books, but you'll need to manage with both an eye towards bringing in top-notch folks, and not recreating the budget hell the previous management had gotten themselves into. Oh yeah - hiring in your field is incredibly competitive, between you and the other departments within your company virtually all of the folks quailified to work in your field already work for your company. You add college graduates to the workforce every year, but those folks are spread around the company evenly, and all departments will receive a relatively equal share of those folks. While folks in the other departments do periodically transfer within the company, your predecessors left your department with a reputation that will make it...let's just say challenging... to attract the best and the brightest. You do have excellent facilities, and your department is considered pretty employee friendly.
Your performance is pretty much based 100% on annual productivity as compared to the other depts in your company. As you can imagine, things are in a pretty sorry shape when you start, so the good news is the bar is pretty low. You've also been told you should focus on long-term productivity, not just a quick turnaround that will only result in temporary/unsustainable improvement. The first year, you pick the low-hanging fruit and triple productivity. While you've improved productivity by 200%, you are still in the bottom 30% on a company-wide basis. A clear cut improvement, but still a ways to go for that promotion. In year 2, you see a productivity jump of 33% from the previous year. While this isn't nearly the percentage increase of year one, only 40% (approximately) of the other departments have better productivity than you. You're still not where you want to be, but you feel good about the direction and progress of the first two years.
Year 3 rolls around, and while you are struggling to identify and correct the reason, productivity is down in a major way the first month and a half of the year. Through mid-February, everything that was a problem in the past still seems to be a problem, and some things that weren't problems before now are. For reasons your working to identify and fix, things seem to have reverted back to where they were before you got there. You recognize that there's still 10.5 months left in the year, and while you've made it tougher on yourself, you still have enough time to continue the upward movement you've started. There is some reason to believe that the first month and a half are far tougher months to produce in than most. Before you have a chance to finish February (much less the first quarter of the year), your boss calls you into his office, tells you that while your performance in the first two years were solid and encouraging, your 1+ month performance has convinced him that you're the problem, and in spite of the first two years performance, he's convinced that you are incapable of even re-creating the productivity you achieved in year two, much less improving on it.
How do you feel?
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