Swallowed by the Whale: Surviving and Managing Change in the Workplace

By Tom Rowlett, Paula Rowlett and Roger Miller

LAYOFFS AND TAKEOVERS in todays business environment are forcing employees, supervisors, and even some executives to accept new assignments, new managers, new work environments, and, in some cases, entirely new

careers.


This book provides useful techniques and advice to help you to adapt, survive, and excel in these situations, whether these changes involve a new office down the hall or a new job title across the ocean.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 23, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452085678

Tom Rowlett

Paula and Tom, together, have over 75 years experience as employees and managers in both large and small companies, as well as working as consultants to several of the Fortune 500.

Book preview

FORWARD

I have known Paula and Tom for over 30 years, and can vouch for their experience.

I found their book to be a useful compendium of tools and techniques that can help all individuals cope with the constant influx of changes that we all deal with in our daily professional lives.

Whether it be a new assignment, a new organization, a new manager, or a new work location, the information in this book will not only provide you with methods to help you manage the change, but it is unique in that it shows you how to learn from past changes to facilitate the absorption of the next similar occurrence.

I am sure that you will find this book as enjoyable and interesting as I have.

Roger Miller

Table of Contents

FORWARD

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PART I: THE CORPORATE TAKEOVER

Chapter One -

The New Budget

Chapter Two -

New Procedures

Chapter Three -

A New Boss

Chapter Four -

My New Responsibilities

Chapter Five -

My New Salary

Chapter Six -

New Rules

Chapter Seven -

Helping Others

PART II: TYPES OF CHANGES

Chapter Eight -

Getting New Responsibilities

Chapter Nine -

Getting a New Manager

Chapter Ten -

Becoming a Supervisor or Manager

Chapter Eleven -

A New Assignment in a New Group

Chapter Twelve -

Being Transferred to a New Job

Chapter Thirteen -

A Promotion

Chapter Fourteen -

New Work Schedule

Chapter Fifteen -

New procedures

Chapter Sixteen -

Relocation

Part III: Dealing with Change

Chapter Seventeen -

Planning For the Change

Chapter Eighteen -

Assessing the Change

Chapter Nineteen -

Dealing with the change (Accept or Quit?)

Chapter Twenty -

Dealing With the Tolerable but Distasteful Aspect of the Change

Chapter Twenty-one -

Learning From Change

Chapter Twenty-two -

Change Proverbs

Chapter Twenty-three -

An Example

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We wish to thank those who took the time to review this book and add their comments, but we especially wish to acknowledge both the good managers (you know who you are) and the bad managers (you probably don’t know who you are) for allowing us to gain the insight required to write this book.

PROLOGUE

Here I sit in the belly of the whale, my little boat and I swallowed whole. It all happened so fast. One minute I was drifting along, captain of my own small vessel, and the next I know, I am sucked down the throat of this giant sea mammal. It is amazing to find myself still in one piece and not already part of the beast’s digestive system. My first thought is to escape, to try to paddle or swim out, but, in time, I think better of that plan and decide that my focus needs to be on survival. As long as I can keep myself in one piece, there is always the chance that eventually I will be spewed to freedom when the monster decides I am indigestible.

I wonder if that is what Jonah or Gepetto felt when they first became aware of their predicament after their famous encounters with a whale. I know it is what I experienced when my small friendly company was taken over by an impersonal corporate giant. We were supposedly intact even though we had become a part of a bigger entity. However, things were different, and, as I was soon to discover, there were changes coming beyond anything I could have expected. Just like those other famous captives my first thought was, Let me out. I don’t belong here. However, like them, I too came to realize that my situation could be handled better by staying calm and focusing on survival. This was my only job, and up to now, it was one at which I excelled. If, as promised, my responsibilities were to remain essentially unchanged, then all I needed to do was show my new employer just how well I performed my assignments and perhaps everything would return to normal. Well I was wrong, and my ordeal was only beginning.

When I first conceived the idea for this book, I assumed that it would describe how one survives a corporate takeover, but as the outline evolved, I realized that was just one aspect of many changes that we, as employees, must deal with in the course of our careers. Decidedly, I felt a broader context was more appropriate.

Part I of this book is the story of my struggle to adapt to a corporate culture after being a key integral employee in a much smaller company. I will not use the real name of the company or any of its employees. For the purpose of this book, I will refer to the name of the new company as SuperCorp and my former much smaller business that that they took over as LittleCorp. The lessons I learned could just as well apply to individuals that have always been part of a huge organization.

Part Two of the book lists nine types of changes that apply to any work environment. Each category is described and annotated with suggestions on how to manage that change.

Part III discusses dealing with change in general. It includes a ten-step approach to understanding how a given change will affect you, and lists the alternatives available to deal with unwelcome change.

I hope you enjoy this book and I hope it aids your survival. After eight years of service I retired from that corporate giant with the satisfaction that I did not let the beast ruin my career or my life.

Authors Note: In this book I use the words he and she interchangeably. It is not my intent to confuse the reader, but to indicate that gender is not relevant. Both my husband and I have experienced all of the events described in this book from both male and female managers. We felt it important not to single out one sex as the culprit

PART I: THE CORPORATE TAKEOVER

LittleCorp was a small company with one manager and about a dozen employees. It had revenues of one to two million dollars a year. The company was in the wholesale business. They sold foods and beverages to offices, restaurants, and hotels. We had a handful of employees in sales that were responsible for recruiting new business, a couple more who managed the warehouse, about four office personnel that called the customers every week to take orders, four drivers who delivered the orders, and three individuals who took care of all of the administrative work. These administrators handled billing, collections, payroll, accounting, and everything else that was not done by the rest of the staff. I had worked in all of these areas except service, but I most enjoyed supervising the office. I eventually ended up back in administration. By the time of the takeover, I was the lone administrative employee.

The company was run by a man named Bill, with whom I had a marvelous working relationship. I knew him for several years before joining LittleCorp, and considered him a good friend as well as a boss. He was unique in that he put all of his employees ahead of profit. When they approached him about buying his company, he insisted, as part of the agreement, that every employee would have a job in SuperCorp with similar responsibilities. The terms of acquisition called for his employees to join with no tenure, so he paid for everyone’s vacations the first year of the takeover. SuperCorp’s benefit package awarded zero vacation days until you were with the company a full year. If it had not been for Bill, none of us would have had any vacation that year.

Bill stayed on as Branch Manager. I received a promotion to office supervisor, which was a managerial position. Everyone was expecting business as usual. I knew that there would be changes, but never in my wildest dreams did I expect corporate culture to change my life the way it did that day I was swallowed by the whale

Chapter One -

The New Budget

One of the first changes to affect me was the financial priorities. As a small company, we had always watched our expenses, no matter how small. Whenever possible we used both sides of the paper in the copier and the computer printer. The office supply cabinet was my desk drawer. I found out that if I forced people to come to me every time they lost a pen or left it home, they were more careful the next time. Every desk calendar in our office was from some organization that had given them away as advertising. I asked everyone to bring in their church calendars if they were not going to use them at home. When my husband was traveling, I had him grab those pens the hotels throw on the nightstand and desk.

I was proud of the money I was saving the company and was not prepared for the effect these activities would have when applied in the new organization. Not only were my efforts not wanted or appreciated, they were criticized as time wasting and insignificant. I had always assumed that a dollar was a dollar. I soon discovered that was not the case. The importance of each dollar was relative. In corporate economics, expense-to-revenue ratios rule. We were now part of a billion dollar company, and to their way of bookkeeping, the cost of the time I spent to save a buck was more than the savings. The way it works in a big corporation is that your salary is multiplied to cover the cost of the company overhead (office space, insurance, benefits, organization, support, etc.). To SuperCorp my hourly rate was four to five times what I actually made. Office supplies, as a business line item, were so far down the priority list it was almost never noticed. My new top priority was to support sales and tens of thousands of dollars in revenue growth, not to save pennies on expenses. On the other hand, the sales team’s expenses were enormous, but as long as the revenues they generated were large enough, no one cared.

The first lesson I learned was when you wake up one day and find yourself working for a new company with substantially greater revenues than you were used to, be prepared to have your financial priorities turned upside down. I suggest that you try to get a look at your department budget. See where the income and expense items for which you are responsible fit with respect to amounts and percentages. Chances are you are spending some part of your time working on things at the ‘bottom’ of the list. In order to adapt to the priorities of your new employer, you may need to abandon some activities and search for more juicy items higher up the revenue scale. At the very least, look at your tasks from the perspective of a company that includes your salary as a part of your overall cost. Ask, Is my time worth these savings? In all likelihood, you will find a shift away from the activities that save money towards those that generate income.

In that light, let me say a few words about my income-generating responsibilities. When I was with LittleCorp, I was constantly praised for my collection activities. I knew how to work with our clients to get them to pay a little each week on a larger debt. I knew from experience that if you allowed their debt to remain, it would tend to increase rather than shrink. I would attempt to reverse that trend by collecting a few dollars a week on their arrears balance. That meant the customer was paying down his bill instead of watching it expand out of control, and since most of these companies were honest and sincerely wanted to pay their debts, it gave them a sense that they were accomplishing just that. Sometimes a LittleCorp customer got into financial difficulty and it became apparent that they would never pay. When I spotted those, I would either put them on a pay as you go plan, i.e. no credit, or have the driver recover any of our assets, and drop them altogether.

SuperCorp could not be bothered trying to collect from a customer that was a few hundred dollars behind. They felt it was not worth either my time or theirs. They would just as soon write them off as a loss. If 120-day accounts receivable got too large they reset it to zero. SuperCorp would hand off these companies to collection agencies, which were highly impersonal, much less effective, and often returned less than twenty-five cents on the dollar. So when I continued to try to work with our overdue accounts receivable as individuals, my boss ordered me to stop. The few times I tried anyway, I began to feel like I was running some covert operation. Eventually I stopped, but it took me almost six months to get my budget priorities aligned with those of SuperCorp. Along the way, I found that I had come close to being fired for not doing the job assigned.

On the other side of the revenue coin, big corporations have expense items that may have been okay for a small company, but now are not acceptable in SuperCorp’s. One that comes to mind in my job was overtime. In LittleCorp, our business was seasonal. It was far more efficient to have the staff work overtime when the business peaked, than to hire and train additional help. SuperCorp looked at overtime as an unnecessary expense. In order to cut costs, the regional manager would simply make a proclamation of no more overtime. When the business began to increase during the busy season and we needed the extra hours each day, this presented a problem for everyone, especially me, who received no pay for overtime. I now had more than eight hours of work per day. I would work through lunch and stay late, off the clock, in order to get my job, and any other work, done. However, some of my extra workload was related to the misunderstanding of my new responsibilities. I will discuss how I dealt with that issue in Chapter Four.

Another budget item that became ridiculously confusing was petty cash. In LittleCorp, petty cash was a very informal, but necessary, process. I had a box in my desk where we kept the profits from the soda vending machine. We used this money to buy birthday cards, cakes, etc. for employees. However, if I had to have cash quickly I would take what I needed, and Bill would replenish it later with money from his wallet. I kept receipts for what I spent, but that was pretty much the extent of the bookkeeping for petty cash.

SuperCorp, on the other hand, had petty cash set up as a regular checking account at a local bank. I matched cancelled checks against receipts and expense entries, just as though they were ten thousand dollar capital purchases. All use of the petty cash account needed approval. Now I was forbidden to keep any cash in my desk. The new procedure required me to gather up the petty cash expense receipts at the end of the month and send them off to headquarters. They would send back a check to be re-deposited into the petty cash account. The first three months after the takeover, we had exceptionally high petty cash expenses due to setting up a standard SuperCorp