“I would like to be clear that I never SAW Robin strangle anyone.”
With regards to the totals, I agree with you as long as the company counts them that way. I’ve known some companies where daily numbers must be met daily and going over another day won’t count towards making up a different day’s goal. So if you only got 20 on Monday, met goal Tuesday and Wednesday and got 30 on Thursday, Monday will still count as a FAIL.
More importantly, you are clearly a good manager and a good person; the same can’t be said for a decent chunk of other managers*. There are those who would try to screw over Ginger’s chances for the promotion because they depend on her work and competence.
- not a majority of managers (unless you asked me on a seriously cynical day ;)), but enough to make me totally understand where Rachellelogram is coming from.
Dear Skald,
Sorry to hear you’ll be losing Ginger, but congratulations for being boss enough to want her to succeed.
Regards,
Maserschmidt
PS. I’ve refused to write a letter of recommendation for someone before, and it’s uncomfortable, but the right thing to do, even for the employee. There’s no benefit to setting someone up to fail.
“I have no direct evidence that the children I have seen in her company are missing or dead.”
- IMO it’s a waste of your time/effort to write Robin’s letter.
2.Be prepared to be working for Ginger.
Good on you. I’m in the same position, screwing myself out of a great worker (and enabling a good friend to move away) for an awesome job. One I’d apply for myself, if I didn’t think she’d do a better job than I.
Oh, the funniest thing: I got to listen to my boss damning a worker with almost no praise. Brett was the kind of vindictive underling who’d sue… so the boss was saying “All I want to go on record as saying, legally, is that Brett did indeed show up and sit at his desk. He finished many tasks, most of them in an adequate fashion.”
In your face, Brrrrrettttt…
Really? Now, if you were Caucasian, that’d be even more absurd.
Makes me think of the story of Harold Swerg, the Greatest Athlete Who Ever Lived.
You’re a good boss.
*Even though that’s actually 311 yards, one foot, one inch.
And would this high-performing “Ginger” be the same employee who, apparently at her own initiative, saved your account with client “Barry” from the under-performing account exec “Tim” several months ago, much to “Tim”'s annoyance?
So… Where do you get your business credit reports? 
Years ago I had left my company and gone to work for another. A few months later one of my former underlings had sent their resume in to the new company. I was contact by the recruiter to give my comments. Being versed in HR, I knew that I had to choose my words carefully. Here is what I said in response to the recruiter:
In response, I will not talk about (other person). Instead I will talk about myself. This company has a very generous referral bonus for bringing in successful candidates. I have not yet chosen to avail myself of the generous referral bonus.
To which the recruiter replied - I understand.
Reminds me of a woman I worked with 20 years ago. She was a Programmer. That was her job title. The lowest job title for programmers at the company. All of the rest of the team were Programmer/Analysts and Sr. Programmer/Analysts. She went through a period of work probation over performance. As soon as she got out of that, she started making a fuss about wanting to be promoted to Programmer/Analyst.
Boss says: “If you want to be promoted to Programmer/Analyst, you need to show me Programmer/Analyst level of work.”
She says: “I’m not getting paid to do Programmer/Analyst work and I’m not going to do it until I get promoted.”
Needless to say, while I was there she never got promoted.
I’ve found that working more than I have to (including the occasional weekend, and I’ve been known to take my computer with me and work on vacation) gives me more flexibility when I need some time to run personal errands. My coworker tends to do exactly what it required of her, is ‘very punctual’, and spends 20-40 minutes a couple of times a month complaining there’s not enough time to do everything. She is afforded less flexibility.
She says I should not put in the extra time and go to the extra effort, because then ‘management’ (Note: Ours is not an especially ‘corporate’ atmosphere) will think we don’t need more staff. Yes, that argument has some validity; but I counter that the amount of extra work I put in (on average, about 3 or 4 hours per week) does not justify the hiring of more staff. She does get her work done, so an extra person would make her job easier, but isn’t necessary. It’s true that I’m generally saturated, but in a good month I might have a day at the end where I run out of data. I hate not working when I’m on the clock, especially if it’s a telecommuting day.
Were there an opportunity for promotion (my boss plans to retire in seven years) I think that I would be more likely to get it than my coworker. (A moot point, since she plans to retire when she turns 65 – four years, I think.) Only I’m quite satisfied writing my programs and processing my data through them. (My coworker doesn’t write programs, and has no desire to learn how to run the ones I’ve already written.) I’d like to learn how to do my boss’s job, attending credit group meetings and helping our members with their credit issues. I’m sure I can do that and write programs when she retires. But coming up to speed on her duties would mean that my own duties would slowed.
This kind of thing will happen from time to time. I was accused of racism because I didn’t hire an Alaska Native for an administrative position. She was qualified, but that was it. No notable experience, or anything to put her above the other applicants. HR came down and said the woman complained that the questions were racist. I pointed out that the questions are actually pro-forma and come from, you know, HR. I also pointed out that in my small department there were three women, an Hispanic, two black men and a guy who was part Apache. It was just a bullshit accusation.
The system is probably better described as monitoring monthly totals, not daily averages. If you work 22 days (176 hours) in a given month, you’re supposed to have 440 calls that month, which averages to 20 a day. (Again I am not using the real numbers.) We say daily average because that helps reps track their productivity better. So, as I wrote upthread, if a rep consistently stops making calls when he gets to 20, any single bad day can wreck them, particularly when it’s late in the month.
When I had the account manager’s job, I’d had to have, say, 25 calls a day Monday through Thursday. This meant I didn’t have to make any outgoing calls on Friday, so I could dedicate that day to creating sales proposals, research, continuing education, or whatnot. Or just go home at noon, which was allowed so long as I’d gotten in my 40 hours that week. I suspect Ginger is doing something similar, though in fact I don’t know; consistent high performers don’t get micromanaged.
There’s no race questions in our promotion applications. And of course I’m not going to be involved in the hiring process anyway except that I’ve written Ginger a recommendation letter and will (unhappily but with feigned enthusiasm) help her prep for her interview.
There weren’t any in ours, either. It was all the usual “where to you see yourself in five years; how do you handle conflict” bullshit type questions. She was claiming that I asked questions of a racist nature. It led to the ridiculous situation of having to have another employee in the room for interviews to verify that everything was done properly. I also made sure the door was always left open. I still didn’t hire her, by the way. I told HR to tell her to file a fuckin’ lawsuit if she was serious about it.
“She manged to solve many self-created problems.”
“She does not steal nearly as much as one would expect of someone with her hygene.”
“She’s able to salvage mediocrity from impending disaster.”
Officemates have not yet complained about noise pollution from her cubicle.
Didn’t you recently have a post about some dude who hadn’t been calling a customer, and a woman who had stepped in and done the guy’s work for him? I don’t remember if you called her Ginger there, but my crystal ball gives a 99.99% probability it’s the same person.
Story told before:
I got hired as a “lab technician, weekend and holidays shift”, along with another woman who worked the complementary shift (two weekend teams, each worked 12h shifts). Both of us were overqualified degree-wise. Both of us brunettes with glasses, and we could have shared clothes except for me being about 1" less short; I’m four years older.
I made a point of going above and beyond; she made a point of never doing anything which was not listed in the basic job description. Anything above that which the boss told her to do ended up being done by either the weekday workers or yours truly. She made it very clear that she considered the job beneath her; she expected to be offered a job as the regional waterways manager and was very surprised when we informed her that it’s a national-government job, you have to apply for it, it’s internal-promotion only so you need to have gotten a lower-level job with that same ministry first, and these are jobs for which you have to compete with other people as qualified as she was or more.
When our contract was close to ending, the factory manager talked to our coworkers and got very bad reviews. We were both told our jobs would end at contract’s end. Then the lab manager went to the factory manager and asked her “what am I supposed to be doing without Nava? She’s been doing all the paperwork! She’s handling calibrations, preparing new methods, she even taught the weekday guys how to clean the pipes and what to do to keep them clean! You can’t fire her!”
The factory manager went back and asked about “the lab girls” again, but this time, when someone said something negative, she’d ask “the tall one, or the short one?” “Oh, no, the short one! The tall one glowing review”
So I got rehired, yay!
My coworker’s reaction? “Whose dick did you blow, you whore?” “None, but when was the last time you did something other than ‘insert sample, puke number’? Call this a wake-up call… or don’t, and spend the rest of your life wondering whose dicks is the rest of the world blowing. Whose dicks do you think the shift leads blew?”