My Black History #15
Beware of Bosses Bearing Gifts
Run when the company provides a PowerPoint Bitch to help you out
“It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem.” ― Malcolm Forbes
A Driven Corporate Executive
A long, long time ago, in a state far, far away, I was an ambitious, driven corporate executive. I climbed my way up to Director and oversaw a $310 million dollar business. Part of my responsibilities was to steal business away from other corporations and bring that work and the associated jobs to my organization. The centerpiece of my sales pitch showed how my team would do the job better than anyone currently making their product.
My weapons of choice were face-to-face meetings with their big wigs and well-prepared PowerPoint slides. PowerPoint is a Microsoft Office program used to create graphic slide presentations of words and images. The slides present key points while a person discusses words and images on the individual slides. The slides are projected on a large screen so they can be seen by everyone in a meeting room.
Specially Designed Slides
My assistant created specially designed PowerPoint Slides for my sales trips at my direction. Each evening, after an expensive expense account dinner to meet the next day’s meeting participants, I would sit down with my laptop and go to work. I would customize the PowerPoint presentations to include the names, mission, and logo(s) of the company I would see the next day.
By having dinner with targeted executives the night before, I knew how to frame the presentation. After a pleasant dinner, some would share their most intractable problems. Since I knew the problems and the names of current management, I would those details in key places, making my slides specific to that company. My company could solve the problems that they told me about the night before. I also had a scrubbed presentation template with no names in case things changed at a company overnight.
Besides my normal duties as the Operations leader, for one week of each month, I visited five to twelve companies. I often started my travel on Sunday leaving my family. I would fly, drive, train, boat or walk anywhere we stood a chance to win new business. My husband and two small children were always happy when I returned.
My visits were both domestic and international. We took work from anywhere we could steal, I mean, find it. I was good at explaining how ‘they’ were staffing a workforce who were sucking up salaries, benefits, space, and time. By outsourcing the work to my team, all of that went away. You taught us how to build your product to your specifications, and all of those pesky benefit packages and retirement commitments vanished. I was successful enough that we doubled our business in three years.
One Small Change
My boss flew in to congratulate me: I was being promoted to Vice President. My job would change just a little, my pay would go up 38%, the option package would double, and I had a company car.
Oh, and one more small thing: I would have a team who traveled with me from now forward whenever I went out to solicit business. An Engineering Director, a Sales and Marketing Director, and a PowerPoint Bitch (also known as a Senior Project Manager) were members of my roadshow. I could hire whomever I wanted for the Directors, but the PPB, PowerPoint Bitch, would be assigned from the main corporate office.
He explained to me that I was now a team. While we had outstanding results, we could do even better if I taught the team my process. As he was unwinding this thought, a picture of a bear trap spontaneously flashed across my mind. The Engineering Director would engineer per my direction. The Sales and Marketing Director would market per my directions. The Project Manager would take my input from the Directors that they would all provide on the trips and tailor my slides. We were going to clone my success. Oh, really. Clone, you say.
I went straight home, gave my spouse the excellent news, and asked where he wanted to move next. I had just been provided with the team I requested three years ago when I was assigned the Operations and Marketing divisions.
As a Black female executive, I walked a tightrope. Senior levels are treacherous no matter your race or sex. Add in race and gender and you are left contemplating “why are they coming for me.” It’s tricky. In most cases, it could have been any reason why the bigger leaders decided that my personal success was cloneable. In this particular case, I knew there was a gender component because of the toxic male behavior of one of my bosses counterparts and the Senior Leadership team. He believed I was lucky, not skilled.
Knowledge Transfer = Deleted
Whenever the company wanted to transfer your knowledge to another vessel; they plotted to delete you as no one needs an empty jar. No one. Somewhere, someone had decided that if I, a mere Black woman, could do IT — IT was a skill anyone could teach and anyone could learn. No matter what I did, my fate had been decided. I would be either booted up or out. The answer was most likely out. There is an endless supply of hungry executives who wanted an already successful assignment. Many have tremendous hook-ups.
Sure enough, seven months later, our division was part of a three-phase reorganization to make a new and exciting organization. The transition team did not contain a single person from our area or the other division sucked up. One organization was taking over all desirable positions. My three team members, the Engineering Director, the S &M Director, and the PPB, were assigned to another VP from the corporate organization. They forced me out by offering me a golden boot which I took. The golden boot is an invitation from one’s current employer to seek employment elsewhere, along with money for leaving.
I started my new job two months after I left my old one. I started looking the day after I got my new team. The new organization struggled to maintain the business growth. All my business connections were known to the team, but they did not understand how to convince the other companies to give them business or how to retain that business once they got it. Building and maintaining customer relationships in business is an art form. Within a year, they were forced to lay off across the combined groups.
Nothing is as easy as it looks, and Karma is a cold bitch.
Toni Crowe retired as the Vice President of Operations to pursue her dream of being a writer. Toni has written six books, two of which won the 2019 Reader’s Choice Gold Awards. Her bestselling business book, “Bullets and Bosses Don’t Have Friends: How Do You Manage A Man Sitting With His Dick in His Hand?” was one of the winners. Her first book, “Never a $7 Whore” was the other.
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