& {sometimes} WHY

Meet Pam, my boss on and off during the 11 years I worked in the corporate communications department of a Fortune 500 electric utility.

Unlike a lot of bosses I’ve known, Pam worked hard. She never asked her employees to do anything she was unwilling to do herself, she got annual employee evaluations done on time, and she helped her employees set measurable goals to aid in their professional development.

In a sentence, she came in early, stayed late, and never lingered over coffee and idle conversation in the time between.

So what was wrong with her? Why is she the subject of this Monday’s Bosses Not at Their Best?

She was petty. Petty in a way that overshadowed the rest of her performance. This post includes some examples of her pettiness forever emblazoned in my mind.

Slapping the hand that’s helping

In 1993, a neighboring electric utility launched a hostile takeover of the utility she and I worked for. One of the strategies the company chose to fight it involved television advertising aimed at our customers, painting the other guy as the villain and encouraging customers to support us. The ads included a toll-free number to call and voice concerns.

Inevitably, the ads yielded a lot of calls from confused elderly people who didn’t understand what was happening and were worried they were going to lose their electricity completely. As a department, we divided up messages that needed a response, and I volunteered to take on this group of confused customers to try to talk through their concerns.

As life would have it, a few of these people could not be reached between the hours of 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. So I took time out of my evenings and weekends to call them. This was before everyone had a cell phone, so long-distance calls resulted in charges. But that wasn’t a problem. I would turn the charges in on my expense account and get reimbursed, which is what I did.

Total cost amounted to about $11. The company had a policy employees did not need to provide receipts for any expenses less than $75. So while I detailed the expense on my report, I did not attach my personal phone bill.

Pam questioned me about it. I repeated the company policy. “Why didn’t you just attach your phone bill anyway?” she said, as if I was hiding porn calls to an 800 number.

“Because I didn’t think my phone bill was anyone else’s business,” I replied. “I did, after all, do this on my own time, which was worth a lot more than $11.”

“Okaaaay, I guess,” she said and reluctantly approved the expense report.

Staying the hand

And her supervisory pettiness extended beyond me. When she moved into the role of company spokesperson and I was promoted to her former job of supervisor of employee publications, I found out just how much.

We hired someone to replace me as employee magazine editor, but I also supervised another employee who had been hired after completing an internship. She’d been at the company for more than a year at that point, and shortly after I became her boss she deposited a stack of correspondence in my in-basket. It was largely thank-you notes and internal memos.

I called her in and, even though I’d taken a cursory look at the stack, I asked, “What is all this?”

“Pam always wanted to review everything I wrote,” she replied.

“Articles for publication, yes,” I said. “First me, then Dave (my new boss). “But I see no need to review your correspondence. I trust you to get it right.”

She smiled.

Pam had never asked to check my correspondence, and I never offered to share it. What a waste of time!

Backhanded compliment or slap in face?

Another time, a manager in the strategic planning department made unreasonable demands for coverage in our employee magazine, whose editor I supervised. Without asking for our cooperation upfront, he’d made getting articles published a key performance objective, and his bonus payout depended on it.

Yep, without asking for our cooperation upfront.

Though we couldn’t do what he wanted as soon as he wanted, I worked with him to focus their messages, develop topics that would benefit employees as a whole and build a plan to make it happen. I proposed four, in-depth quarterly inserts on key topics that I would write myself.

The results were much more informative (and strategic!) than the slapdash article originally requested, and the group was delighted. The extra mile I went built excellent repor between our departments, and I became good friends with the director and the affected manager.

Pam wasn’t my boss when this happened, but we had a reorganization, and she became my boss again. Shortly after, in the CEO’s staff meeting, the director of strategic planning complimented me by name, saying I healed a broken relationship. Our new director, Mike, was also present, relayed the comments to me, and thanked me for the work I did.

Mike had also told Pam, who reported directly to him, how one of her employees had made the department (and him) look good in front of the CEO. Unaware Mike had already talked to me, she came to my office to pass his comments along. But she started off the story with, “Now don’t let this give you a big head…”

[For best effect, click on “play” arrow and turn on sound..]

I politely interrupted her and said Mike had already shared his appreciation, “but he didn’t see any reason to let all the air out of my balloon over it” like she had.

She looked a bit peevish.

The root of petty

Pettiness is a trap a lot of bosses fall into. Why? Because they can?

Yet petty attitudes and behaviors in the workplace are counterproductive. They can create distrust, divide teams, hinder growth and negatively impact employee retention.

Psychologists say petty people are insecure themselves and find it necessary to make others feel smaller than they feel. In fact, petty comes from the French word petit, which means small and inconsequential. Think petite.

I knew Pam was insecure from the get-go. Early on in working with her–in the days before computerized layout–I would show her a page layout diagram, and she had a difficult time envisioning what it would look like and would try to second-guess me, but I stood firm. I knew more about design than her, and she eventually learned to trust my judgment.

But when I would run article concepts by her, she pushed back if anything was the least bit threatening. For instance, during the AIDS crisis, I proposed a series of articles to help employees navigate uncertain terrain and preserve their health, which was in the company’s best interest. She really didn’t want to broach the topic, as many responsible companies were doing at the time, and I had to work to get her to yes.

One of the articles discussed precautions, and she seriously just wanted me to tell people to not have sex. “That’s not realistic,” I said, “and besides, that’s not our place. Our place is to help employees understand what’s informed behavior and what’s risky. They get to choose.”

She’d said as much to me one time when I complained about the company covering sterilization procedures and vasectomy but not birth-control pills.

In the AIDS articles, I prevailed. Stand up to a petty boss and keep pushing back. Gently perhaps, but honestly, and they generally back down.

Petty does as petty is

Our company eventually merged with an Ohio electric and gas utility. In the ensuing reorganization, Pam was no longer anybody’s supervisor. She was back on the same level as me, except she was first to be offered one of the two Indiana jobs that would report to our new manager, who hailed from the Ohio company.

In the days before that second job was filled, Pam was on the phone a lot–for HOURS, literally–actually lobbying our new boss to choose Karen, who I had hired and trained, over me. Pam had let Karen in on what she was planning, and Karen filled me in, as well as telling me she already had another job and was moving on.

Only after Karen turned the job down and resigned did they offer it to me. My new manager said she had been leaning toward me because I had more experience and years with the company, but Pam had spent hours on the phone persuading her otherwise. No surprise there.

Later, our vice president told me it was because “everyone liked Karen more than you.” So are we pledging sororities now?

Petty sure went all the way up the corporate ladder that go-round. And it was anything but funny to me.

But she who laughs last…

Going forward, it was obvious Pam didn’t like reporting to someone who was doing her old job–and not doing it well either. Like I said, she always moved the work forward, which her successor did not. So Pam found a position in another department–organizational development.

I wasn’t happy with the new boss either. About six months after the merger took effect, the company offered a buy-out to whittle down its displaced employee pool, and I took it. When Pam heard, she called me and said perhaps she could help me find something in her new department because “the company shouldn’t lose good people like you.”

“No,” I said. “Thanks but no. I’m ready to leave. I’m going to work for myself.”

And then I did.

I finally found funny, and I’ve been laughing ever since.

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