YES BOSS:

Meet Ezekiel;

When Ezekiel landed a job as a supervisor at a local factory, it was the best news his family had received in over 5 years. In that period, he had lost both his parents, worked a number of odd retail jobs and endured a 'love-less' marriage. His marriage to Pamela had seen more lows than highs, especially after Pamela had lost her job as a fashion retail sales manager four years before. The only reason that truly kept them together was their 6 year old daughter.

So when Ezekiel got the job of supervisor at a factory, he had reason to celebrate. And celebrate he did. The rest is history.

Slightly over a year in his new job, Ezekiel got another break. His dedication and work rate was awarded by a promotion. He was awarded with an assistant manager position which effectively made him the third in the hierarchy of the factory.

Within a week of his promotion, a departmental meeting was called which Ezekiel chaired. His first words; "I thank you all for your attention today, and I'd like to ask all of you to do your job, work extra hard and just do your part. We all need our jobs. In fact, the factory doesn't need you, any of you. It's you and all of us who need these jobs."

His voice had been as audible as the message had been clear. The factory doesn't need any of the employees. After all, these were no specialized positions that required very skilled labour, so any one that would be shown the way out of the door would be replaced the next day.

The words had come out as easily as if he had kept them in reserve for many days before that day. His words were not short of the new confidence and self-assuredness he had gained. Actually his words showed a high level of daringness, almost to a point of recklessness. It was as if too much excitement surged through him. He was buoyed by this new role, alerted to his surrounding in new ways, poised with anticipation ready for today and tomorrow, no longer afraid of being taken by surprise or overwhelmed. He was the boss.

For all of Ezekiel’s new found confidence and arrogance, he was still the man that respected his job above anything else. He was willing to keep his job by all means possible. However he showed a lot of weaknesses. The first weakness he displayed was a lack of resourcefulness. He was the yes boss type of leader. He accepted everything he was ordered by his superiors without recourse to any thought or knowledge. For all he exhibited, he would have stuck his head in the factory boiler if the boss had told him to do it.

As much as this was a great trait of a team player, it denied the team great attributes of diversity. The kind of submissiveness seen in Ezekiel was one that deprived the factory of free thought which is a recipe for ingenuity and inventiveness. Ezekiel, however un-resourceful, was not the biggest problem for the factory.

Ezekiel had faults and flaws, like any other human. The kind of flaws he had shown and exhibited did not so much prove to be divisive for the team. These were shortcomings of a member of the team. Every team has a member with flaws. Perhaps each member of each team has their own unique flaws. These flaws of each individual in a team add to the dynamics of an entire team. Yes boss. But nothing prepared the factory team to the kind of team dynamics Jeremiah would add to the factory team.

Boardrooms can be deeply affected by personalities

Meet Jeremiah;

Jeremiah had always been one whom his friends and peers described as highly opinionated. He had an opinion on anything and everything. His outspoken nature had got him noticed. But he wasn’t only noticed for his outspoken nature but also that he had worked his way up the factory ladder and was seen by many as the bridge between the top factory management and the factory floor workers. He interacted with everyone in between and somehow he seemed to fit in with all sides.

To the factory floor workers he was their voice, the one guy who always felt hard done by the system. He was the one guy who had a decent education, decent experience but was never at the top. To those at the top, this was a guy from the factory floor who didn't seem intimidated in their presence. He made jokes in their presence and interacted with them whenever he could.

In other words, Jeremiah was a 'people's person'. He actually played the part of a people's person quite literary. When a worker trying to fix electrical fittings fell from a ladder, Jeremiah was the first to rush that person to the hospital. But the life of Jeremiah was not without frustrations. There were many times he complained that other people had come and quickly rose high up in the factory hierarchy, while he remained static. Others still just got a higher take home pay than he did, when they were supposedly having the same position and that frustrated him more. Whenever he mentioned this to the floor guys, it resonated well with them as they too almost always felt they were not getting the true value of their labor's worth.

As the days kept spinning by and they turned into months which turned into years, Jeremiah had more and more people that believed in his words & his way of things. He started to believe in himself too. With that he developed a habit for talking, and talking he did. You didn't need to invite him for a conversation as he almost always bugged into conversations and just took over. He would drive a line of reasoning in many different ways for an obnoxious amount of time. He literary didn't talk but he preached. His efforts often paid off as he got a sizeable number of followers.

The more he believed in himself the more he became dangerous, as he became a chatter box ready to talk at any time. While others adored his chattering, many became more and more irritated by it. To those that got irritated by the chatter, this was a guy who found fault in everything, the people, the management, selected fellow workers and just the entire system. He was the one always on the right while the whole world was at fault.

But then, he hit the big break when the factory second in command resigned to take a position at a different factory. Jeremiah was offered the position in an acting capacity. Jeremiah was the wise choice by any means. This was a guy who had endeared himself to all from the factory floor to the echelons of power. He was a people's person. 

However it turned out later that this was not the right choice. The factory was not prepared for the kind of team dynamics Jeremiah would add to the factory. His unwavering chatter was now dividing the workforce. While he may have gotten away with it when he was on the factory floor, it wasn't appropriate now for a leader to be as loud mouthed as Jeremiah had become. While he was somewhat different from Ezekiel who in the eyes of many lacked ingenuity, Jeremiah's loud mouth and his belief in his ways only did not go down too well with many.

He said too much, he thought he knew too much, so whenever he found opportunity, he tried to lecture whoever dared spare time to listen. He never kept his mouth shut for a moment. He would go to the factory floor and tell all the workers that the system was not fair. He told the whole world that, while he was second in command, Ezekiel who was ideally third in command got paid more money than him. He complained that many a time Ezekiel had made decisions that seemed to have hinted at overruling his earlier decisions. He painted Ezekiel as a power hungry bloke who would trudge on any one's shoes to get to the top.

Day after day Jeremiah painted a very grim picture of a power struggle at the top. Was there really a power struggle at the top? Well, when the factory boss was away after not feeling too well for a week, Jeremiah was overheard as usual in his chatter style discussing the failures of his boss with the head of another factory and that head advised him to take advantage of the absence of the boss and do as much as he could especially in the areas where the boss was lacking. This, Jeremiah was told, would land him the top job and see the boss sidelined.

However, the same day Jeremiah was told that, he was back to the factory floor telling some of the workers how other factory heads did not trust in the boss's abilities and competence to take the factory forward and that one of the factory heads had asked him to take advantage of the absence of the boss to improve his own stock.

Day in day out, Jeremiah was telling one worker about what the other worker had said about one thing or another. He was telling the boss how some of the workers were operating in an unacceptable way. He was telling the boss that some floor workers stuck to their desks more than they did work on the factory floor. The next day he was telling those workers how the boss had erred in allowing all the other factory heads to have unabated control of the factory. Those that never bought into Jeremiah’s way of doing things, he labeled them demons. How crude!

As time passed, the team spirit that once existed in the factory was slowly fading. With a fading team spirit came poor results in the factory. Jeremiah was the ultimate saint, the people's person. So the factory operations went on and on and all the controls, processes and procedures were thrown out of the window. Those that sought to stand up and defend systems and controls were label 'rigid, overzealous and lacking respect for the factory hierarchy'. They were told to relax.

So anarchy prevailed and further bad results were posted and Jeremiah didn't see any of this as he was busy chattering with the next person then another and so on and so forth. Ezekiel being a hard worker that he had been since first getting a job at the factory tried to engage the right people and processes that once got the right results but he was yet again labeled power hungry and once more the anarchy continued.

Yes Boss….

The case of Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the boss is very much a case of personality clash coming in the way of organizational efficiency. If systems and processes are not strong enough and there is little effort at protecting them, anarchy will ensue and the collapse of an organization is imminent. While Jeremiah may have been able to inspire many factory floor workers as one of them or the level just above them, he could quite clearly not be able to lead at the very top of the factory or be among the top leaders of the factory.

His habit of discussing people's salaries from those at the top to those on the factory floor constantly put everyone in a position of feeling hard done by or unappreciated. He was a ‘people's person’ and they believed him even when most of the time he spoke from a position of mere speculation without any facts. He acted more like a unionist than a factory leader being paid to manage the affairs of the factory together with the boss, Ezekiel and the entire team.

The one thing that everyone should have seen through Jeremiah was his constant need for popularity. It is as if he had come to the factory for a popularity contest. He told everyone what they wanted to hear and then went on to tell the next person something different and so on. It is only politicians that try too hard to impress everyone, to make everyone love them. The truth is that it is not possible for all to love you or buy into your ideologies and ideals. Not even Jesus Christ the messiah and bearer of the good news had everyone buying into his teachings. Even after more than two thousand years of fervent teaching by his followers, the message of Jesus Christ of Nazareth is still not universally accepted. But why was Jeremiah so busy and hell bent to portray himself as a saint par excellence?

As for Ezekiel, he was and always will be a hard worker whose managerial qualities needed to be improved by the boss. A bit of training and learning how to delegate without pouring out threats would have helped Ezekiel to position himself and the factory in good stead.

As for the boss, he lacked the basic tenet of leadership-vision. He also didn't prove to be his own man by allowing to be hoodwinked by Jeremiah to even turn against his own people most of whom had delivered for him for many years. But the biggest problem turned out to be that the factory was run on a yes boss type of management without recourse to due knowledge. The boss has spoken so yes boss, we will take away all controls. Yes boss Jeremiah is right, the guys on the second floor just sit around on their desks doing nothing hence you need to start maligning them. They don't matter; the organization is bigger than any of them. Yes boss.

Since Jeremiah's promotion, the results of the factory were getting worse by the day. Like they say, numbers don’t lie, but no one heeded the warning. A line in a famous poem would best describe the inertia that surrounded the factory in not heeding to the danger ahead of them as numbers became worse and worse month after month. The line from the poem says; "The sun warms the dancing lake, but overhead the heron casts a shadow that warns of cold below."

The factory and all its workers ignored the warnings to drown in the cold. But who could blame anyone for not heeding to the warning? This was Jeremiah the saint. It didn't matter whether he was a good manager, a great leader or just plainly an authoritative boss. This is the story of Jeremiah.