We’ve all had bosses and business associates that are tough to get along with. The corporate landscape is already tough enough and has gotten even tougher in this economy as everyone is fighting to land a job and stop evictions, stop their car from being taken, and keep their kids warm and safe.
In these turbulent times, you have to even watch your back at work. Even your boss could be your enemy and you may not even know it. Life was good for an associate of mine. She worked hard and took her job very serious. She would be at work at 6 am and would be there so early that she would turn the lights on.
She stayed late. She worked weekends from home. She sacrificed everything just to do a good job. She was a highly paid and highly trained consultant and worked as a contractor to a publicly traded firm in downtown Atlanta on Peachtree. One day, her boss who hired her and loved her got terminated from the company. Although she got along extremely well with her former boss, she decided to stay on at the firm during the turbulent times. Her former boss warned her that things were changing.
She got a new boss who was hired in from another well known and large firm. Immediately, the new boss decided to take control. The new boss did not know as much as her and did not like this fact. In a corporate change management meeting, the new boss asked everyone in the room what they thought they could do to improve the company. Being passionate, my colleague jumped at the chance to speak up while everyone stayed silent. This would be her death knell. The new boss felt upstaged and felt like my colleague was trying to outshine her.
The new boss’ mission became one thing and one thing only: get my colleague out of the building and out of the job. The new boss didn’t know exactly how to do this but she came up with a very sly plan. She cruised down the hall way pretending to be a friend of my colleague. The new boss talked, joked, laughed and then asked my colleague if she was interested in becoming a full time employee. Because my colleague had seen so much change at the company where people were literally working 16 hour days on a $50,000 per year salary, my colleague said that she would prefer to stay a consultant due to the long work hours and demands on the other employees. She said she loved her job and loved how dynamic it was but didn’t want to work long hours, miss her child, and not get paid.
In a week, she was terminated and stories were being told about her as a slacker, an underachiever, and poor worker. She thought she could trust the new boss by telling her the truth. The truth sent her directly to the unemployment line where she could not get unemployment because she was a 1099 contractor. The truth forced her to have to relocate from Atlanta and find a job in another state, uproot her child, change schools, and lose her home and belongings. Do you think her boss is an enemy and was wrong for terminating her in this manner? Could this have been handled differently?
Do you have similar stories? Please comment and send them to the author.
Republished from my original article on the Atlanta Examiner site.
