A Conversation I Never Had - Maurice

I have worked for some hard men in my life; hard in the sense of the way they thought about others and life and money.

One of these hard men was Maurice, not his real name. Maurice gave me a job when I really needed a job, though he didn’t know I really needed a job that doesn’t matter, he still gets credit because he didn’t have to hire me.

Maurice had been through other executive managers before my arrival, and none of them lasted; because you see, Maurice was a hard man. You either produced or you were gone. Let me rewrite that, You either produced quickly or you were gone.

Maurice also wasn’t one to care about certain legal rules and regulations and that attitude was common knowledge within our particular industry, as I may have written already, Maurice was a hard man.

On the other hand, Maurice generally left me alone to oversee operations the way I saw fit, including changing our policies to conform to the rules and regulations he didn’t care whether he followed or not. More than once I had to tell him that the law was the law and the regulations were the regulations and that we were going to train our people to follow them. He never gave me a hard time about this kind of thing; sure, he’d be blunt about his opinion of the laws and the regulations, but he never once tried to stop my adherence to them.

I recall that once Maurice visited one of the locations I managed and had been harsh with the staff – which was generally his way. A local staff could be doing 99 things exceptionally well, but Maurice would find the one thing they weren’t doing well and would come down on the staff like a ton of bricks – he could devastate morale in 0 –60 seconds and it would take me weeks to rebuild it.

In this particular instance I arrived at the location shortly after Maurice left and when I found out what had happened I was “hot” as they say, in other words, I was angry. So off I went to see Maurice at his office; he wasn’t there so I waited for him, and waited, and waited. Finally he came and I followed him into his office and shut the door.

I exploded at Maurice. I told him to never ever ever talk to my people the way he had just done and I told him about the damage he did when he acted that way. He could have fired me. I may have fired me if I had been him and he had been me; for I really lit into him. But do you know what? He was cool and calm and I left with my job intact and he never acted that way again  while I was with him and the subject was never spoken of again. He handled himself better than I did in his office, a fact I’ve pondered more than once.

To be continued…