A Slap in the Digital Face, Part 2

I always go for win-win. In every scenario that I will describe in this series, my aim was always to help everybody improve, and get us to a high-performance team. I believe in feedback. I believe we're all fallible. The objective is never to get someone in trouble (another reason why I waited decades to begin to write about all of this). 

In July, 1988, I loaded up my car, and my parents' pickup, and with my brother and mom, drove to Plano, Texas. Monday, the 18th, was my first day as an employee at Nortel Networks, in Richardson. The DMS-250 organization was located there. They manufactured the big, complex digital switches that ran the telephony networks of the major telcos, like BellSouth, Ameritech, Pacific Bell, GTE, etc. 

I had accepted a position in their Marketing Leadership Development Program (MLDP), where for the next three years I would rotate between different units, gaining a breadth of experience throughout the corporation. MBAs from strategic universities were recruited into the program. I had earned my MBA from Texas Christian University. While it wasn't on the formal list of strategic programs, I was chosen, I believe, by way of my passion for the industry, and relentless pursuit of entering this particular program, over a two-year period. 

I had a ministry attitude about my corporate career. I saw myself as a positive and ethical presence, no matter where I landed. I was eager to prove that good people can excel in the rough-and-tumble culture of a Global Fortune 500 company. 

My passion for ethics derived from the two experiences in 1980, that resulted in an invisible boulder being placed in my life's path. I was on a single-minded mission, to root out corruption in corporate America. I was motivated by a desire to have value while never facing the boulder itself. The bigger the challenge, the easier I could avoid dealing with the real problem, which wasn't corruption in corporations (Oh, I had gotten that assessment right!). But, rather, before I could attack a problem like that (which most decidedly resides on the other side of the boulder), I had to face the real problem: me.

I was assigned to one of the Product Line Management organizations. It would be my responsibility, for the next year, to serve on the team delivering new software loads of the equipment to the customers. I interfaced with the Scientific R&D division of Nortel, called Bell Northern Research. I worked with the Marketing function, with Sales professionals and engineers. I interfaced with the manufacturing group, based in Raleigh, North Carolina. My primary deliverable was to write the documentation that would ship out with the product itself, a cycle which took about an entire year. I came into a situation that was already cranking at full throttle, and there was not much time for a learning curve.

They put me into a room with two cubicles, one which I occupied for the next year. The other cubicle was the office of an industry veteran, that I'll call Employee X (EX). EX had worked her way up, as an employee in the assembly plant of the Dallas company that had been acquired by Nortel. She began working there right out of high school, and with no college education, by virtue of her hard work and attention to detail and follow-through, had emerged as a valuable employee that was highly regarded throughout our organization. 

She was a chain-smoking, profane, driven workhorse that logged probably 60-plus hours a week. It was clear from my first ten minutes on the job, that she did not want me there. She started right away putting down the MLDP program, and had stereotyped me as someone lacking the skills required for the job, that was only hired because I had an MBA.

Our manager had left the position the same week that I started. For the first several months, EX was my acting manager. This made things even worse. 

Despite my efforts to be positive and cordial, she started by hounding me, and never let up. She gave me no advice or coaching, but expected me to perform at her level, at least. She would have a cigarette constantly, the smoke of which filled our room. That winter, the company implemented a no-smoking policy. This required her to leave the building, from then on, to smoke; which sent her into another level of resentment against me, as I didn't smoke. 

My moral bearing was affected by the environment. EX put me on my heals . . . and this is where I stayed for almost that entire year. But she got results, and for that reason the management function in Richardson, all the way up to the most senior VPs, obviously had no interest in improving the culture of our division. 

EX escalated her vitriol against me. She began saying things like "You'd better get the f-----g documentation for Release 19.1 done by Monday morning, without mistakes, or I'll personally c-str-t- you and grind your b---s with my own hands, and feed it to the birds." 

There is no exaggeration here. She would talk like this, daily, for months. Initially I tried to respond in a lighthearted way, but she made it clear she was not messing around. She wasn't going for a laugh. It wasn't just "locker room talk." She knew my values and deliberately sought to intimidate. She let up when we finally got a manager placed over us, a respected veteran of the company (that also had been in the old organization before Nortel took over).

After several weeks of this, I did what they told us to do in employee orientation: I went to Human Resources (yes, I learned better than to do this, eventually).

HR's response was basically to tell me: "Well that's too bad, but you're going to have to suck it up and get over it. EX is respected around here and Senior Management isn't about to do anything about it."

This statement about EX, I learned later, was another pattern that triggered me. Bad, or unethical people, that have renown work ethic and are "respected"; people that can get away with horrible behavior, simply because they get "results." Somehow . . . I would continue to be placed under or near people like this. Every single time, I would get triggered. My weaknesses would grow. My emotional responses would become more bitter. The target on my back became clearer to predators. The boulder would expand. 

As the weeks unfolded, it became clear that a lot of people knew that I had been to Human Resources about this. 

So, this was my first hard-knocks experience in corporate ethics. I learned that there is probably no upside in trying to help your employer improve, ethically.

I was in a situation that clearly was not acceptable. 

That was 1988 to 1989. Over the next thirty years, American society would begin to see the results of a culture that does not listen to important feedback from the front lines. My experience was simple, manageable. A win-win was possible for everybody, from me to EX and everybody in between. 

But if even a simple situation like mine, in 1988, was too hot for professional managers to handle, how could we possibly expect more complex issues like race and other problematic business issues to be addressed? It all adds up to a combustible mix that, aggregated throughout American life, kept getting swept under the national rug, only to explode into the serious crises of 2020.

Next: The Ethical Framework

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