The last year I worked for Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, I was supervised by a woman who destroyed my faith in my skill,
intelligence, and competence. She raged at fellow employees in front of me. She called me in to meetings and tore me apart, with the curtains open wide on the conference room so everyone who passed by could see her pacing and gesticulating, and see me white-faced and terrified. She left me without direction, and then reviled (and sometimes reversed) my decisions. Fortunately, I was already planning to leave the company, but she made my last six months a living hell. It took me several years to recover my confidence.
(This was not typical at Ben & Jerry’s, by the way. For the first
five years of my tenure, I had a manager who gave me enormous levels of support and helped me learn to be a good leader. Overall, I experienced Ben & Jerry’s as taking care of the people who worked there in myriad ways. Rather than saying anything terrible about Ben & Jerry’s, this story illustrates that even in the best companies, where people really are valued, bad leadership can destroy productivity and damage people.)
Through her new organization, Humans at Work, Kelley Eskridge wants to make this kind of behavior (and a whole host of less egregious but equally destructive ones) obsolete in business. For this, as well as for her remarkable fiction, she is one of my heroes.
I speak not only as a former employee struggling to maintain my sense of myself and do work I could be proud of in the face of bad management. As a young manager, I would have given anything for the training Eskridge is offering. With Eskridge, I believed that:
Work is a human thing, the product of human brains, human muscles, human spirits, human hearts. And so work, like the humans who do it, can be awkward and exciting and scary and sometimes messy. And it has the human potential for joy, if business would only make room for it.
(from A Leader’s Manifesto)
In my twenties, I just didn’t have the skills I needed to make it work that way. I was inconsistent. I sent mixed messages. I made arbitrary decisions. I got in the way of the work. Not on purpose, of course—I was always reaching toward a different way of managing. I always wanted to do a good job by the folks I worked with and by the work itself. In most cases, that vision saved me from being a terrible manager, but I could have done much better—and that knowledge weighed me down and made me less effective. I came by my skills the hard way, over years. Eskridge’s expertise could have made the learning so much easier, and made me effective so much earlier.
Kelley Eskridge is a wisdom entrepreneur. She wants to make a big change in the world, a change that will outlast her. She has the wisdom and the capacity to make it happen. She has created a remarkable business model that makes her expertise available to businesses (in the form of a turnkey program that they can use as is or adapt) for free, as well as offering consulting for a price. From reading her fiction and her blog over years, I know that she is a community-builder at heart. I can’t wait to see where Humans at Work goes.
You go, Kelley. We’ll be watching, and cheering you on.
Lessons Learned From Working Under a Challenging Supervisor
The last year I worked for Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, I was supervised by a woman who destroyed my faith in my skill,
intelligence, and competence. She raged at fellow employees in front of me. She called me in to meetings and tore me apart, with the curtains open wide on the conference room so everyone who passed by could see her pacing and gesticulating, and see me white-faced and terrified. She left me without direction, and then reviled (and sometimes reversed) my decisions. Fortunately, I was already planning to leave the company, but she made my last six months a living hell. It took me several years to recover my confidence.
Through her new organization, Humans at Work, Kelley Eskridge wants to make this kind of behavior (and a whole host of less egregious but equally destructive ones) obsolete in business. For this, as well as for her remarkable fiction, she is one of my heroes.
I speak not only as a former employee struggling to maintain my sense of myself and do work I could be proud of in the face of bad management. As a young manager, I would have given anything for the training Eskridge is offering. With Eskridge, I believed that:
In my twenties, I just didn’t have the skills I needed to make it work that way. I was inconsistent. I sent mixed messages. I made arbitrary decisions. I got in the way of the work. Not on purpose, of course—I was always reaching toward a different way of managing. I always wanted to do a good job by the folks I worked with and by the work itself. In most cases, that vision saved me from being a terrible manager, but I could have done much better—and that knowledge weighed me down and made me less effective. I came by my skills the hard way, over years. Eskridge’s expertise could have made the learning so much easier, and made me effective so much earlier.
Kelley Eskridge is a wisdom entrepreneur. She wants to make a big change in the world, a change that will outlast her. She has the wisdom and the capacity to make it happen. She has created a remarkable business model that makes her expertise available to businesses (in the form of a turnkey program that they can use as is or adapt) for free, as well as offering consulting for a price. From reading her fiction and her blog over years, I know that she is a community-builder at heart. I can’t wait to see where Humans at Work goes.
You go, Kelley. We’ll be watching, and cheering you on.