One of my hobbies is to dream up fun ways to shame the higher ups. The basic gist of it is that you have to thread a needle between the fiction that you as an employee care about the business and the business cares about the employees and the reality that the business primarily cares about increasing profits and the employees just don't want to be bothered by silly management tactics.
So in order to be successful at this and deliver maximum shame you have to pay the same amount of lip service to the fiction as management does while savagely illustrating the reality. And do it as publicly as possible, but not in a town hall or all-hands meeting. All-hands meetings are ridiculously expensive from the corporate perspective so derailing them to make a point makes you out to be a villain. At least wait until they ask for questions.
But if the boss gets up and grabs everyone's attention for a minute, that's the perfect time to go on the warpath. "So what are we going to get for all this effort? Gift certificate to Applebees?" especially if that's something that's been done before. The idea here is that the boss is making an appeal to sacrifice personal comfort for the good of the company. That's never okay and is poor management. So raise the question of what we're getting in return.
The payoff is twofold. First everyone paying attention gets the pleasure of watching the boss squirm. Second is the eventual pavlovian conditioning that gets the boss to respect the workers by not making unreasonable demands just because nobody will stand up to them. They need to justify it with more than hoorahs.
The best part of it I think is if you do this once and get away with it, you won't see it again for awhile, then when they do and you have to remind them again, you can watch that flash of 'oh right, I can't do that with Vince around' on their face.
Won't work in the public sector where the expectation to sacrifice yourself for the public good is intrinsic to the culture. But I consider carrying the torch for workplace respect part of what I consider "managing up" and one of the things I try to bring to every role.
I'm surprised this seems to work so well for you. I've had colleagues do similar things and it pretty much always resulted in them being "managed out", outright fired, or mysteriously lumped into a round of layoffs that otherwise didn't affect their department.
It really is about threading a needle and making sure you pay the appropriate amount of lip service. It really helps to make yourself really hard to fire and likeable otherwise in the organization. Respect starts with you respecting others and the company. If they respect what you do for them, then you get the latitude to push back on stuff.
So in order to be successful at this and deliver maximum shame you have to pay the same amount of lip service to the fiction as management does while savagely illustrating the reality. And do it as publicly as possible, but not in a town hall or all-hands meeting. All-hands meetings are ridiculously expensive from the corporate perspective so derailing them to make a point makes you out to be a villain. At least wait until they ask for questions.
But if the boss gets up and grabs everyone's attention for a minute, that's the perfect time to go on the warpath. "So what are we going to get for all this effort? Gift certificate to Applebees?" especially if that's something that's been done before. The idea here is that the boss is making an appeal to sacrifice personal comfort for the good of the company. That's never okay and is poor management. So raise the question of what we're getting in return.
The payoff is twofold. First everyone paying attention gets the pleasure of watching the boss squirm. Second is the eventual pavlovian conditioning that gets the boss to respect the workers by not making unreasonable demands just because nobody will stand up to them. They need to justify it with more than hoorahs.
The best part of it I think is if you do this once and get away with it, you won't see it again for awhile, then when they do and you have to remind them again, you can watch that flash of 'oh right, I can't do that with Vince around' on their face.
Won't work in the public sector where the expectation to sacrifice yourself for the public good is intrinsic to the culture. But I consider carrying the torch for workplace respect part of what I consider "managing up" and one of the things I try to bring to every role.