Another visit to my therapist

Had another appointment with Paul my therapist this Sunday, as you may remember last week I did an exposé on how to use middle managers efficiently and my therapist thought my perspective was just a mask for some hidden personal issues. He said I’m controlling people more than I can admit, and this attitude might be caused by the fact that I don’t trust anyone else but me. I was like, am I totally insecure, is that what you’re trying to insinuate? Do I look like a control freak?

I then explained why middle managers need to be tightly controlled and why such attitude is actually a good one. CGI has 100+ offices in 16 countries and we’re 26,000 employees total. So let’s say that for a large BU with 2600 employees, there would be at least 20 VPs and 200 directors, around 10% middle management. So total we might have around 2500 middle managers total at CGI.

If every middle manager is given the liberty of spending $100 on something – anything – this amounts to a quarter million dollars.

That’s a lot of money, said Paul. That’s right I said, you give each individual a tiny budget, and quickly it explodes into a massive expense that blasts a gaping hole into your bottom line and the next financial quarter. Then the CEO – that’s me – gets toasted by Wall Street analysts.

Paul seemed thoughtful again, and asked, but what if this $250 000 is actually an investment that could generate more revenues, you know, like training your people to better perform without having to ask middle managers for permission at every step of the process?

I knew this one, as I heard it thousands of time. “Give us a penny, we’ll transform it into a 20 dollar bill”. The world doesn’t work this way. Any internal investment is a major risk, and you need to manage this risk to make sure it returns something. And frankly, this is too much work because people tend to spend it on long term investments and the employee turnover rate is too significant to do anything long term. People will train themselves, only to go work for a competitor after 3 years. I mean, I spent 25 years at Bell Canada, I never knocked on a competitor’s door for another job, because.. well.. Bell had no competition as you know. Bottom line is, you can’t trust people to be at your service tomorrow morning, so a result I manage like there’s no tomorrow.

So you don’t invest anything in your middle managers, asked Paul, not a penny? Well, we do actually invest in them, military-type training to make sure time sheets are approved by Monday morning at 7 am. I like to come into my office at 8, open my laptop, and monitor billable time for each of our office. If a director does not approve the time sheets of its subordinate, he or she is severely humiliated by a local VP. I’ll spare you the details, but that usually does the job.

Our session was over, and Paul scheduled another appointment next week. I got the feeling that I said something wrong again during the session…