In the 1980s Breakfast Television was invented and broadcasters were suddenly faced with mountains of new airtime to fill and no budget to do it with. And then TV-am discovered Claire Rayner. Claire Rayner would offer trite and obvious advice to people too dumb to ask a mate or read a book before google when not everyone had a handy Encyclopaedia Britannica… Today we are too sophisticated for agony aunts. So if you want to make money out of doling out trite advice you need a specialism.
For the pecuniarily tight we have Martin
Lewis.
For the loudmouth opinionated Brexiteer
taxi driver we have LBC.
And for the
career obsessed we have Alison Green.
For those of you with the good fortune not to have heard of her
Alison Green runs a blog called “Ask A Manager”. For Alison was a manager once … or so she
tells us often enough. That said I see
little evidence that she was ever a captain of industry. If you read her CV on Linkedin she appears to
be a freelance writer. Well, she is a
Contributing Writer to U.S. News and World Report and has one or two other
freelance gigs. So she might be on wages
or she might not but it doesn’t sound to me like a management position to me. ‘Cus it aint got no Manager in the
title. Of course she was a definitely a Manager
once a long time ago … but more about that later …
What’s great about being a Manager anyway? Stay in any organisation long enough and
someone will say “you’re in charge of that now” or “you’ve got to train these
new people” and bingo – you’re a manager.
That really is all there is to it.
Yet Alison, whose career is in PR, has made a living of making
management sound like the province of the competent and wise. We could go into a deep analysis of one her
articles but let’s cut to the chase and look her values. This is the creed of Alison Green (as stated
on her “About” page):
I believe the whole
point of managing is to get things done. Everything else follows from there.
Since we were hunter gatherers things have got done. They have not got done just because someone
“managed” them. They have got done
because they needed to be done. The
prime driver for people to do things is survival. At least it is when you’re living at the bottom
of Maslow's hierarchy of needs pyramid which is where most of Alison’s
correspondents seem to abide. That’s not
to say efficient management can’t get things done more efficiently with less
effort and stress but the primary function of all management is political
control not to get things done – that is secondary. This is why no one ever writes in to Alison
asking how to do their job more efficiently - instead they write in and ask how
to get hired, how to get their coworker fired and how to get a raise because
their work is “not recognised”. Her blog
is a cesspit for the worst of office politics – nothing more.
I believe that
employers and employees should just be straightforward with each other and not
let things fester. Unless you’re deluded or a jerk, candor usually leads you
someplace good. (And if you are deluded or a jerk, you have bigger problems
anyway.)
I think that most of us know that if we were candid with our
bosses we’d be back down the Job Centre faster than you can say P45. The way to get a job is not to have skills
and qualifications (though that helps) it is to mirror back at the employer
what it is that they are looking for.
The idea we should all be “candid” with our employers is a nasty joke. All my employers (I’m now on number 8) have
been utterly convinced that my ideals and opinions almost exactly coincide with
their particular ethos … despite the fact this is clearly nonsensical. Why?
Well, it isn’t plausible that I could believe in their
values and those of each of the 7 other employers who contemporaneously
believed that I believed in their often very different sets of values too. If I had believed in everything my employers
had believed in I’d have believed in both propping up Saddam Hussein and an
Independent Kurdistan. I believe in
neither. I’m just an artisan who sells their
skill and labour. The problem is no
employer wants to believe that is what they are buying. Why?
They suffer from abandonment issues.
If they believe that you believe that the job is a vocation then they
feel better about paying less in renumeration.
I believe that job
searches and hiring processes are two-way streets; candidates should be
evaluating employers just as much as employers are evaluating candidates.
This is wrong on so many levels it is almost beyond
satire. The hiring process is NOT a two
way street. It is a one way street. The employer holds almost ALL the cards …or
at least all the best cards. This is
because even in times of full employment there will always be more managers
than the managed – this is a fundamental political truth that the above
statement is a deceitful denial of. Yes,
Alison, that’s why Trade Unions were invented … because employers and employees
are equal.
And candidates should
be screening for jobs where they’ll excel and be happy, not just trying to get
any offer they can.
And of course there’s nothing worse than the person who
applies for every job going like Yosser Hughes.
Despite the fact this is exactly what the Job Centre requires you to do
when you go there to sign on. It’s funny
we’re meant to live in this capitalist society where the aim and measure of
success is accumulation of wealth yet as soon as you dare to even think about
applying for a well paid job all these so called capitalists suddenly turn into
General Yamashita. Let Alison Green remind you of
General Yamashita's motto: be happy in your work.
I believe that you
should take criticism gracefully, even when you disagree with it.
Thanks but I’ll stick to being rude back to people who are
rude to me unless they’re in a significantly higher echelon of power.
If nothing else,
you’re learning something valuable about how someone else sees you.
No, I already know people hate me, Alison. I haven’t learnt anything from them
expressing this feeling. I don’t need to
know why everybody who hates me hates me.
I’m content to be hated.
I believe in being
brutally honest with yourself — about what matters to you and how much, about
what you can and can’t change, about how you’re going to respond to the things
that you can’t or won’t change, and about reality in general. This is the
recipe for a happy career and a happy life.
Ah “brutally honest” – a favourite phrase with the bullies
everywhere.
The raison d’etre of all agony aunts – that one person has
all the answers – is so obviously absurd it hardly needs pointing out. But let’s do that anyway. The real function of the agony aunt is not
intellectual but emotional. It is not to
answer questions but to reflect the opinions of their correspondents back
towards them so that they can sagely agree.
Thus they build a following made of the blind being led by the blind
round and round in circles like a teddy bear…
All of which is largely nonsensical and mostly harmless
since the primary driver for the agony aunt correspondent is mostly
loneliness. Still, if nothing else agony
aunts take pressure off the Samaritans…
and yet … there’s something really noxious about Alison and her ilk. But then again…
Perhaps it’s not Alison herself but the people who write in
to her and the poverty of intellectual ambition showed by the daily dilemmas
that obsess these correspondents…
I’m being thanked way too much
I get mis-gendered on the phone
I interviewed for a job that didn’t match the job posting
Asking a former manager to be your reference when they’re
trying to hire you
My coworker keeps interrupting me in person rather than
emailing
Will my employee be demoralized by a coworker’s promotion?
Should I organize an all-men beach weekend for my coworkers?
These are a few of the latest mind-challenging muses … sad,
aren’t they? No one ever writes in and
asks for technical information. No one
talks about what they actually do for the world. No one who’s written in ever comes over as
someone who’s contributed to the betterment of society. No one has a political thought beyond their
own survival. They are all completely
and overly obsessed with boring office politics… Yes, if it’s one set of people who clearly
don’t screen for jobs where they’ll excel and be happy in but are just trying to
get any offer they can it’s the correspondents of Alison.
I intended this piece to be an attack on Alison’ philosophy
of life rather than an ad hominem attack on herself but…, as the late Ray
Presto used to say, I had to ask … How did she end up doing this?
Well, back in 2009 and for several years before Alison was
the “Chief of Staff” of the Marijuana Policy Project. This is one of those “non profits” of which
Americans speak – meaning it was a lobbying organisation for the legalisation
of marijuana that has no sharelolders because no one wants to be seen to be
sharing a spliff.
Alison was the right hand woman of its CEO Rob Kampia – a
position of immense power and importance.
However, things eventually went to pot when it turned out that Rob
Kampia was a serial sexual harasser.
Seven senior managers resigned in protest when Rob’s behaviour got a
little too un-ignorable...?
Over at the Way Back Machine …
…we learn that Director of Membership Salem Pearce told HIGH
TIMES in 2007 that...
“This is all part of
a pattern of behavior by Rob, who was known in the office for his sexually
explicit comments and actions towards female employees and interns,
particularly ones half his age and desirous of full-time jobs with MPP. Rob's
willingness to jeopardize the organization for sexual gratification and his
desperate attempts to keep his job sickened me and made me no longer able to
work for him.”
She put the responsibility for her resignation firmly at the
doors of two people - Alison Green and Rob Kampia.
“Prior to this incident, I had confronted Rob about his
advances toward one of my employees,” according to Ms. Pearce. “He dismissed my
concerns and refused to stop hitting on his employees. After the incident, and
even after nearly 20 per cent of the staff quit in protest, it became apparent
that Rob and his second in command, Alison Green, were planning to sweep this
all under the rug.”
You have to wonder how much fun an organisation was to work at whenre people seemingly resigned “on principle” with presumably no other job to
go to and the extreme unlikelihood of getting a positive reference that tends
to transpire when you call your boss a pervert in the national press. That said it would be biased not to let
Alison tell her side of the story and one should also read her comments on the
scandal…
“I talked to him about this many times. I tried to get him
to let me implement a sexual harassment policy. He refused, claiming that if we
did, people other than him would be in violation of it too. (And that was true
— he’d created a culture where he wasn’t the only one who told dirty jokes and
talked about sex inappropriately, which was all the more reason to address it.)
I talked to him over and over about the impact his behavior had on women.
Multiple times I tried to get him to understand why it’s horrible to have your
boss assessing you sexually — why it’s awful and unwelcome in a way that’s much
worse than with someone who doesn’t have power over you. He was unmoved. I
tried to explain the legal and PR jeopardy he was putting the organization in.
I got nowhere. Ultimately, he was my boss and I couldn’t make him change.”
Methinks the lady doth protest too much. But the point is … When actually confronted
by a difficult situation at work Alison found that in reality she had no power
whatsoever. She found that candor and
being straightforward did not work out for her.
Perhaps that’s why she’s obsessed with telling us all we are empowered…
“Anyway, the board of directors suspended him for three
months, then reinstated him when the three months were up. The morning he
returned after being reinstated, I left.”
Poor Alison... In the
end it was all brushed under the carpet (or rug), Rob Kampia was reinstated and
she was left to carry the can.
When the #MeToo movement started up in 2017 Rob Kampia
resigned yet again and left the Marijuana Policy Project to start the Marijuana
Leadership Campaign… where he no doubt has another Alison Green between him and
the staff… This may explain why Alison
wrote her article explaining her actions in 2007. Is it victim blaming to say she’s trying to
shut the stable door after all skeletons stuffed in her closet have bolted? Perhaps.
Perhaps not. But one thing’s for
sure … I wouldn’t ask her for career advice … because things don’t ever seem to
work out for her…
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