For some reason I thought the VP was the boss. I see now.
2 means 10 minutes. Then another 5 minutes to get everyone back on track. Now the meeting is running 15 minutes late. People generally don’t like having their time wasted. Especially busy, important people.
Not everyone wants to be the leader. But most people want the benefit of being part of the group. The problem is when people want the benefit but they don’t understand their role or choose not to participate.
I noticed you don’t like to be harangued, but you forgot to do the one thing she didn’t harangue you about.
Why would you want to embarass anyone, even if they said something stupid?
Is that a common issue where you work?
I usually block the hallway and scream NONE SHALL PASS!! at him.
Totally agree with this - the boss doesn’t want to look incompetent in front of the VP.
I work in a corporate office of a US firm and I deal with VPs on a regular basis - in fact I don’t deal with anybody below them unless they ask me to. I treat them just the same as everybody else.
My fear is trying to make small talk with guys who are 20+ years older than me & who work in an industry that I have no personal interest in. I don’t really have much in common with them so I tend to stick to work related topics, unless they ask me something about my background (I’m British).
When The Grand Poobah was expected to make his annual appearance in the office, our manager gave us the heads up, with instructions to be sure our work areas and ourselves appear neat and professional. (“Put away the coffee mugs emblazoned with “you don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps”. And please please, make sure your shoes are on your feet at all times, you dumb bitches.”) Oh God, I remember our slavedriving, toxic, type-A VP conscripted me on short notice to take minutes at The Big Annual Meeting (because his own secretary of 20 years was out). I was literally shaking in my boots. I did my best, but I swear I suffered PTSD months afterwards.
Meh. I asked for the job and figure I ought to play along. My bosses seem to be respectable and competent, so this isn’t a terrible chore for me. But then again, I don’t have to deal with the kind of situations I’m seeing in this thread.
I treat the big boss with professional courtesy, same as I do any other co-worker. Whether I engage in good-natured bantering with them depends on how often I see him or her.
Those who fall all over themselves like Basil Fawlty before the gentry at the sight of the higher-ups, at first, amuses me. But if it runs to a ridiculous degree, it will become annoying.
We had a guy like that at one of my previous companies. He was just a creepy guy in general. Basically he fauns over anyone who he thinks can help is career like Smithers from The Simpsons. He’s also a bit of a weird sexual deviant so he also seems to gravitate toards the senior management who share a similar propensity to creep out interns and be seen in bars with young women who aren’t their wife. Actually, to a certain extent a significant portion of the company was like that.
Yeah, that only works for so long, and then the leaders find themselves without a support base…which is why you find many top executives bouncing from company to company with a small coterie of remora schooling in their slipstream. Real leadership–they kind that will save your ass when you make an error–demands that you are as courteous and supportive of your lower ranks as you want them to be of you. I’ve been in both types of organizations, and while the former is more common, I’d give up serious pay to stay in the latter.
I’ve probably learned a couple of things, but more importantly, I’ve given several pointed lectures on basic mechanics using a whiteboard. It’s hard to draw a freebody diagram in the air.
What wigs me out is the disconnect between lower (what I’ll only somewhat ironically call “functional”) management, and upper executive management. At least once a week we get some kind of corporate announcement which is three paragraphs explaining how pleased Rondo T. Dunderhead is it announce that Blunderpuss O. Ferndocker has been promoted to Associated Executive Senior Vice-President of Finance, Ethics, and Sidewalk Development, like any of the troops give a hog’s wet asshole about these people. It’s positively Heller-esque, and I mean that in a Something Happened sort of way.
Yep–my 9-year-old stepdaughter, for reasons only known to herself, often carries around a small whiteboard to write down her Deep Thoughts. Recently she came to me with the whiteboard and showed it to me. Written on it was “The toilet is leaking.” Now that’s something worth knowing.
The difference between the corporate world and the academic world in the US is instructive, I think. IME university presidents and vice-chancellors go out of their way not to be treated like persons apart. I worked at a college where the president would sit and eat lunch in the cafeteria with all the faculty and students…not once a month, but every day. Even where I’m working now, at a much larger place, employees can talk to the college president pretty much whenever they want, even though he is working close to 24/7 (only a slight exaggeration–I’ve received e-mails from him at 2 AM on a weekend).
I wouldn’t be the slightest bit concerned if the college president ran into me on campus and I was committing some minor faux pas like not wearing a tie on a summer day, or using the wrong fork at dinner (why that is a pet peeve of so many I do not know; I ate dinner with a Lord of the Realm once and he used the wrong fork for his starter). If I were working for a private company of the same size, would I try not to do those things around the CEO? Sure. Would it make me a better worker? I doubt it highly.
Yes, they are very useful if you are having a group discussion and want to capture people’s thoughts. It’s a tool and like any tool it is only as effective as the person weilding it.
Well, in our group. when we’re trying to solve some complicated engineering problem it comes in handy. We use the whiteboard to draw pictures of our proposed solutions.
Still, it takes two minutes to go fetch a whiteboard, it’s no big deal. The VP isn’t going to sweat it that much unless he’s a total asshole, in which case, he’s not worth working for anyway.
If it was really that crucial, the boss should have worried more about that than about sending somebody to pick her lunch order.
I’ve never met anyone in my life who “worshiped” a CEO or VP. I’ve met plenty of people who fear them, but only with respect to “I’ve got two mortgages, two minivan payments, 4 kids, and a prostate the size of a casaba melon and need my health insurance. If I lose this job, suicide is probably my best option, with bank robbery a close second.”
Around here, it would take a lot longer than two minutes to fetch a whiteboard (but the conference rooms all come with them and they are in everyone’s cube - but attached to walls, so they couldn’t be fetched - for something that RNATB thinks aren’t very useful, we spend a LOT of time writing on whiteboards - either they are useful, or everyone likes red Expo marker all over their hands).
If you want a specialty whiteboard with the printer in it, that needs to be scheduled and delivered by facilities - or you need to book a conference room where one is installed (only a few and they are often booked).