Worst job I ever had was at Starbucks [1] in the early 1990s. I had my liver cut out and fed to me every single day.
I could not reconcile the positivity put forth by CEO Howard Schultz (and conferred thru HR's training regime) with the miserable treatment we received. A fish is rotten from the head down and all that.
Years later I was in middle management. I couldn't believe how hard it was to change things, get people to behave better, etc. I was all about learning organization, empowerment, democratic decision making. Stuff that really pulled people out of their comfort zones. Any successes I had, mostly thru will power, came at a very high cost.
I then became a lot more forgiving of the Howard Schultzes of the world. He was doing pretty much the most any CEO/President can do: Stay on message, nudge the needle, hope for the best.
I will note that friends in other departments had very different experiences. Some are still there and loving every minute of it.
So I also learned you can have a good job at a bad company, a bad job at a good company, and if you're very lucky, a good job at a good company.
[1] I was the CAD guru for the Store Planning dept, which did all the retail architecture. Performance was measured in "sales weeks", meaning how many weeks all the stores are open per year. As a publicly traded company, the pressure to hit the projected sales weeks was intense.
I could not reconcile the positivity put forth by CEO Howard Schultz (and conferred thru HR's training regime) with the miserable treatment we received. A fish is rotten from the head down and all that.
Years later I was in middle management. I couldn't believe how hard it was to change things, get people to behave better, etc. I was all about learning organization, empowerment, democratic decision making. Stuff that really pulled people out of their comfort zones. Any successes I had, mostly thru will power, came at a very high cost.
I then became a lot more forgiving of the Howard Schultzes of the world. He was doing pretty much the most any CEO/President can do: Stay on message, nudge the needle, hope for the best.
I will note that friends in other departments had very different experiences. Some are still there and loving every minute of it.
So I also learned you can have a good job at a bad company, a bad job at a good company, and if you're very lucky, a good job at a good company.
[1] I was the CAD guru for the Store Planning dept, which did all the retail architecture. Performance was measured in "sales weeks", meaning how many weeks all the stores are open per year. As a publicly traded company, the pressure to hit the projected sales weeks was intense.