The Latest in Professional Development
Discipline in the workplace is a tricky thing.
Say, oh, just for the sake of argument, that someone in the course of drafting and signing a contract with a client established the price for the services provided at $100.
Say further that there is absolutely nothing that the company, a law firm, does that costs as little as $100.
Once the firm is actually working for the client, simply picking up the phone to ask if they think it's going to rain over the weekend gets billed at $500 an hour.
If a pen is allotted to the task of sitting alongside a blank sheet of paper just in case a thought occurs to an associate, those pens run about $1,000 for a batch of three.
Walking down the street and knocking on the client’s door is going to cost the client a cool $3,000, and more if it is raining, and more still if slush hampers the course.
If a fruitful thought about the client so much as forms above the head of one of the team members leaning back in her chair as though ideas regarding a legal strategy for the client are forming like clouds taking shape prior to precipitating, this too goes down on the document allotting costs, and seldom accrues to less than a couple of grand.
The examples could go on and on, but you get the picture: actually nothing around this place costs $100, much less a multi-year project executed by several team members gathered onto a project organization chart.
It is to laugh, is another way to put it.
And yet…there it is.
Someone – to protect his identity let’s call him ‘you’ – was left in charge of finalizing the contract establishing the cost of services at $100,000 and instead entered $100 on the line.
No wonder the client was so eager to sign! This is your first thought.
You had imagined that they were simply demonstrating how pleased they were to be dealing with such an up-and-comer at your firm.
When you saw their eyes widen and dollar signs roll into the sockets of their eyes in the manner of a slot machine display as you sometimes see in the better class of cartoons, and you further saw them dash to grab a pen and sign the contract with the speed of a roadrunner pursued by a coyote, you took it as a kind of silent homage to your negotiating skills.
Well, as it turns out, it was more an homage to your non-negotiating skills, or your negotiating non-skills. if you prefer it that way.
What a humorous situation!
This is your first thought as the conclusion becomes unmistakable and you get the feeling a few days later that you had better let someone know that the firm was providing $100,000 worth of labor and intellectual expertise but was on track to be compensated for right around $100 of that labor and intellectual expertise.
Well, exactly a $100.
This is your tone when you talk first to your boss, then his boss, then her boss, then his boss. You had never known the company had so many bosses and so many ways to express displeasure!
There is a certain similarity to each occasion, with the person behind the desk hearing your story, saying “you did what?” and going into various stormy demonstrations of rage.
You hadn’t known there was quite such a variety of these either, these stormy demonstrations of rage, but you are now here to tell anyone who asks that the category is a rich and deep one.
The question now before this clutch or cadre or shadowy underworld of bosses is what to do with you.
They search their minds for scraps of history and reflect that many of their favored solutions are against the law and would cast an unappealing light upon any firm, much less a law firm.
Boiling in oil seems severe to some and just about right to others, but it’s a little hard to know where to do it, where to get the oil, where to go for an oil-boiling permit, and the like.
Flogging has its advocates, as does catapulting you into a volcano, as does lashing you to the mast of a ghost ship and setting it adrift in one of the more remote oceans.
The ideas fly fast and furious around the boardroom while a young person scrambles to get them all down on paper.
“Remember,” says the person facilitating the exercise, “there are no bad ideas at this stage!”
In ruling out the illegal, immoral, reputation-destroying, and repulsive, however, the list is a mighty short one.
Suddenly, a junior member speaks up from the back of the room.
“How about putting him in the stocks?”
“Stocks? What are those?” asks a senior member, still in the data-gathering stage of the proceedings.
“Oh, you know, they are horizontal restraining devices made of a wooden or metal framework with holes carved out for securing the head and hands, firmly erected on a post. “Stockades” is the proper name, but they go by the shorter and easier ‘stocks’ in the name of workplace efficiency. It is a type of corporal punishment from the Middle Ages, but our HR consultants are telling us that it is also is the next big thing in workplace corrective action.”
“Hmm,” the CEO says, and the people around the table seeing that he is not averse to the idea also say, all of them, “hmmm.”
He is a quick decision-maker and suddenly says, “all right, let’s do it. Throw him in the stocks! If that is the correct way to put it.”
Everyone assures him that it is indeed the correct way to put it, and the next day upon arriving at work you are shown to the break room where your head and hands are locked into the device in the manner already described.
Well, this arouses a certain amount of comment among your colleagues, ranging from pity to frank disbelief that anyone could be so dumb.
One fellow wanders in to get some Funions from the snack machine and sees you over there.
“What’s up? Aren’t your Ferguson from Receivables? What are you doing in the stockades?”
You explain the situation as best you can.
This fellow whistles softly in the manner of someone deeply impressed. “I heard about that but I thought it was in the nature of an urban legend, one of those incredible tales that arise from the common folk. But it turns out to be true! This is like meeting Little Jack Horner or that fellow with the claw who is always scraping the door handles of cars there on Makeout Point!”
Others, in keeping with the rich historical tradition of the stocks, gather round and mock you, and perhaps ask you if you could write each of them a check for a dollar or so, but to be sure to accidentally turn each dollar into a thousand dollars.
The joke, weak from the onset, does not improve with repetition, though given the number of times people say it seems they are convinced it does.
And so the long day wears on.
At the end of the day you are released just in time to fight the rush hour home, and then it is the same routine the next day and the next, for whatever length of time is deemed appropriate for your offense.
Management likes it because you serve as an example to others.
Your colleagues like it what with the whole public jeering and mockery thing, which otherwise is a little hard to come by.
You, for your part, like it as well, and view it as the least intrusive of the options discussed, better than the boiling oil, that’s for sure, better than filling out an expense report, no doubt about it, and a hell of a lot better that sitting through a traditional performance review.
