From the Sneaky-Manager-Bible.
We have already brought you some guidelines for the sneaky manager in our post on email forwarding.
The present post illustrates the best use of email threads and cell phones or smart phones.
Used correctly, both can advance your career and destroy the pesky colleague or subordinate who may stand in the way of your personal and organizational fulfillment.
Email Threads
Invented by well-meaning product managers and developers as a means to help people follow a conversation through many iterations and with many people.
You can break threads to your advantage. Threads will break naturally, often because of "on top-ism", where replies are fired off without much thinking to demonstrate how agile and cool a recipient is. So, sometimes, all you do is exploit a break caused by someone else. This is better than you killing a thread and starting a new one -- anything goes wrong, there is someone else to blame.
At other times, you need to cut a thread and start a new one, usually when you made a mistake you do not want to fess up to.
Or when you find out one of your people has asked for and received help.
If you cannot tolerate outside help, cut the thread and then ask the good Samaritan to "go through channels in the future".
Starting a new thread on a subject (or an advantageous slight variant of the original) makes it incredibly difficult for anyone to complain about the competent, pro-active, goal- and revenue-focused you.
Neither line managers nor HR want to go through multiple threads, build timelines, for anything but serious criminal issues, so your backstabbing self can be fairly sure that - without lots of effort - most of your activities will appear to be in the "he said she said" realm.
If you spot a "cut thread attack" on yourself and want to aggressively defend yourself, merge the split threads back into the original one. It takes only a few minutes of your time and signals to the attacker that you understand his approach. But be aware of the danger -- you basically have declared war.
Cell Phones
With more and more communications being recorded, you are sad that the days of unrecorded instant messaging are gone, but despair not. Smart phones can do the trick even better.
Do not use the company smart phone for your dirty work. You have your own, private cell phone, use it. The employee who has complained to upper management must leave. So, upper management either needs to not respond to the complaint or tell the employee that he or she might want to use the company jobs pages or site to look for another position in the company. That's clean, even nice. All the rest of the communication has to go through private cell phones. You can usually threaten an employee very effectively without adding anything to the company records. There is a risk that the employee will try to record such conversations but that's illegal in most places. Besides, if you decide to switch over to only private cell phones, you presumably do so because you consider the employee a threat. Not a physical threat -- you immediately call the police for that -- but a damage to your reputation, or maybe an employment lawsuit you'd surely lose. Once the person is demoralized enough, HR will talk to her or him. HR folks are trained to stick to scripts, so the company has nothing to fear when the HR specialist picks up the land line phone and explains the administrative details around the departure to the worker.
Defense: Summarize conversations in email to "make sure we are on the same page", or "to have a clear understanding", or "make sure I do not drop the ball". Again, your attacker will see this as a declaration of war.
One more thing: No regrets. Yes, you may be intelligent and reflective enough to realize the co-worker is harmless, but you have a hierarchy to convince and maintain. If that is not enough, there are the old stand-by moral pillars "everybody does it", and "I have a family to take care of".
No comments:
Post a Comment