This is a true story about corporate stupidity and malevolence. It happened to a friend of mine, we'll call him "Mike." His name is not actually Mike, but he is bound by a confidentiality agreement, so I can only tell his story if I keep everyone anonymous.
The essence of Mike's story is that he was a very good employee, but he got stuck in a job that he didn't like, so he requested that the company find a different position for him, one that he could do very well and that would help the company he worked for. Instead, they slowly destroyed his career with that company, for reasons that Mike still finds baffling, as they clearly hurt their own company. It is a story of people doing very bad things to someone else without cause and excusing their behavior by hiding behind the bureaucracy of a big company.
Mike was a manager with a big company. They went through a large reorganization, and Mike saw his duties increase substantially at the same time that his best employees were moved to a different manager, and the work was less familiar to him and so more difficult, but he took it all on. He was also told that he would swap duties with that other manager within one year, back to employees and work he was more comfortable doing, so there was a time limit on the whole exercise.
Because of the timing of the change and the prevailing economic conditions, Mike's reward for his efforts was nothing. Literally nothing whatsoever, unless you count keeping his exact same job grade for the same pay as something. No certificates, no lunch, forget about opportunity or a bonus. As nothing as nothing can get. The reorganization saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars. At the end of the year, Mike got a good review, same as he had gotten every year for several years. Raises were very small due to the economy.
In time, other people higher in the organization were rewarded. Mike never was.
In anticipation of the switch of managers, Mike and his fellow manager got together to make some adjustments to the reorganization, because it was becoming clear that the new arrangements were not working well. They laid out a structure for their work after the switch, in detail, including all duties for each manager and which staff would report to whom, and they took that to their boss. Their boss agreed that the current situation was not working, and the discussions included possible promotions and potential hiring of additional managers. The boss set aside all of the ideas for additional consideration. None of it was acted on.
The time came for the job switch with the other manager, and the switch did not happen, nor did anything else change. A few more months went by, and Mike began to realize that nothing was ever going to happen -- no promotion, no help, no structural changes, not even the job switch.
Now Mike is not the sort of person to sit still and whine privately when he thinks things are not working for him, so instead, he proactively worked out a solution. He went to his boss and asked for a demotion. He would give up being a manager and go back to being an individual contributor. Mike did not need the money so badly that he had to stay in a job he didn't want; let someone else deal with the headaches of his job, stuck with a boss who would not do anything to improve the situation. And his boss agreed that he could make this change and would do very well, but that it would take some time to make it happen.
Mike was very relieved, but he also made this comment: "Now all I need is for [my boss] to actually do something."
It took nearly three years, but that was the beginning of the end.
The story continues in part 2.
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