One of my fellow managers sent me an email earlier complaining that I am buying my team of inside sales people lunch today. I do this on the last Friday of the month when the team exceeds its productivity goals* by a set amount. She feels that I do this too often and that it makes her look bad to her team for not doing likewise. According to her, the free lunches should come at most once a quarter, and should only be done when the team exceeds its sales goals** rather than the productivity goals. She also avers that I am undercutting her practice, which is to issue write-ups for people who don’t meet their goals.
Her team is trending more than ten percent below its sales goals for the first half of the year. They are just barely meeting their productivity goals.
Mine has exceeded both its sales and productivity goals.
Oh, and I am paying for the lunch, not the company.
How should I respond to this…person?*** Maximum vituperation, please.
*I.E., number of calls made per week, number of unique customers contacted per week, and amount of time spent on the phone per week.
**New business brought in and existing business grown, obviously.
***No, I’m not actually going to tell her to FOAD. I am not a complete moron.
If you don’t answer to her, you don’t owe her any sort of response. If she asks you about it later, just say “Oh, that? Since you’re not my manager, I assumed you were venting about your team’s poor performance and I just happened to be the undeserving target that day. I’m actually shocked that you expected a response!”
This is my fault. I wasn’t asking for serious advice on how to response, as I intend to ignore her. I was looking for amusing responses whiich I won’t use. Hence “maximum vituperation.”
Tell her that you have found the carrot approach of rewarding incremental success works better for your team than the stick approach of punishing occasional shortcomings and that your team success rate appears to bear that out. Since your performance is evaluated based on the success of your team, you’re going to continue doing what works, but you appreciate her concerns.
Get your team kazoos. Then when the numbers come in and your team produces higher numbers than hers they can all play their kazoos and march around the office and into her space in a self-congratulatory parade. When she gets offended tell her they liked this idea better than the lunch thing anyway.
Hmm. I suppose I could program Word’s auto-correct feature to change the word “nitwit” to her name whenever it’s typed, and then write a note with all that, but addressing frequently by name, so I’d have the experience of frequently calling her “nitwit” without the repercussions.
I am aware that your team doesn’t do to well and your funds are limited by the nonexistent bonus you receive. I however can afford to give my team what I consider a reward for performance.
It appears you haven’t realized the relationship between the productivity goals and the sales goals. Also, you seem to have failed to note that by using punishment as a motivator, you get, to quote ‘Office Space,’ a bunch of people who will work just hard enough not to get fired. How I spend my discretionary income is none of your business."
