The Bottom Line Vine

A friend of mine emailed me this article recently…

When Marie Lupe Cooley, 41, of Jacksonville, Fla., saw a help-wanted ad in the newspaper for a position that looked suspiciously like her current job, and with her boss’s phone number listed, she assumed she was about to be fired.

So, police say, she went to the architectural office where she works late Sunday night and erased 7 years’ worth of drawings and blueprints, estimated to be worth $2.5 million.

Cooley was arrested and charged with a felony, and needless to say, she lost her job. The irony, which you may have guessed is that her job was not in jeopardy. The ad was for a position at her boss’s wife’s company.

Clearly there is a hole in this woman’s marble bag, but I can’t help but wonder what else was happening, or not happening, at her company that would drive her to react this way. How effectively did her manager make her feel like a valuable member of the company? Beyond that, why was she looking in the help wanted in the first place? We don’t really know what went on behind the scenes so my point is not to draw conclusions about that company’s office culture, but instead to remind us to think about how we are managing people.

As managers, here are some questions we should periodically ask ourselves…

1. What are we doing to make our employees feel valued?
2. Do we know if our employees are happy at work?
3. If they are not, what are we doing to address this?

We can’t please everyone all the time and we shouldn’t try to, but we need to be listening to our people and addressing these issues. It’s easy to spend all our time managing projects and processes, but at the end of the day business is about people, and as managers we need to manage our people.

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