The parallels to current events are not hard to see.
“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” – George Santayana
To some in this world today, that quote isn’t a warning, but a playbook.
Great managers are developed by great managers. If you look around your workplace and don’t see great management, senior leaders might want to look at learning how to be great managers and leading by example. If your workplace, like many others, would be better off with far fewer middle managers, it’s likely because there is too much bad management happening. So much, in fact, that it might be better to not have middle managers at all.
I sense there are a lot of managers in those industries who have it confused. I also think it might be a good idea to ask a boss what productivity measurement they use when making claims about how much more productive we’d all be in the office. If they can’t make a clear case showing the gains in output, it’s possible they do not understand how to measure productivity and have always been using placeholders like time in the office.
That’s not good management.
This is true at Microsoft and it’s true at every other company that has made similar moves. I have no idea why anyone would think cutting jobs and forgoing raises would not have this kind of impact on employee morale, but I suspect there were a lot of C-Suite folks who did, or maybe they knew and just didn’t care.
Maybe instead of telling interviewees that they should be doing immense company research, and practicing their questions and responses so that they don’t ever have to refer to notes we should be calling out interviewers who do exactly zero prep work before an interview. Instead of making excuses about how busy hiring managers are and how we can’t possibly expect them to do any research into a candidate when they are interviewing so many, we should consider how many interviews the candidate is doing and how many companies they are researching. If the hiring manager can have my resume and any notes in front of him during the entire interview, why can’t I have notes too?
This is a good time for all of us to reconsider how we share data, who we share it with, and the process of cleaning up after data has been transferred. MoveIT is not the only data transfer service, they’re just the one who got breached this month. Next month it could be the one we use. Take steps now to limit the damage that could be done.