A Note To Upper Management

Get to know your lower management team. You never know when you will need them! Let me give you an example.

About 10 years ago, I was working as a sales manager for a company that employed about 150 people in most states of Australia. We had a contract with a major teleco for supplying mobile phone services as well as fixed land line services to small and medium sized business. I was in charge of the mobile phone department. At that point the company had been in business for over 10 years and going from strength to strength, or so I thought.

One morning, the CEO of the company comes down from the top floor and knocks on my office door. I looked up and I instantly thought, ‘what have I done wrong that the CEO himself comes down to sack me?’ An extreme reaction you might think. Not if you understand where this man was coming from. This was a man who only nodded at you when you happen to catch the elevator with him. He never uttered a greeting to anyone that he considered to be lower than him. He was very old school in his management style. This day he comes down, asks if he can come in for a ‘chat’ and sits down. He asks me how I was, how my family was doing, thanking me for the great job I’d been doing and that was it. He said thanks for the chat and ‘we should do lunch sometime.’
I sat there dumbfounded and shell shocked for a moment or two. Then I realised, bugger! The company was in trouble. A little while later, the owner of the company did the same thing! Then I KNEW the company was in trouble. I did some digging and sure enough, we had lost the contract with the teleco we were signed with. Most of our business depended on that contract. They both then started to hob knob with the entire sales team and admin team and everyone was very worried. They never did that. Most of the staff didn’t respect them because they were treated like second class citizens. We were in major damage control mode for weeks till they figured out what to do. We lost most of our sales team, and admin team in the process. Eventually they restructured
and we were back in business but it was like starting again from day one.
This might be an extreme example but, no matter how high your position is in a company, CEO, Managing Director, Chairman of the board or whatever, get to know people under you. This isn’t the 1920s where upper management were in a class of their own. When things get tough and you have bothered to treat people below you with respect, then you can count on their 100% loyalty to band together and get through any tough times.