Withholding Information at Work - Is it a good idea
Withholding information is Never a Good Idea
In order to ensure job security some people want to increase their value by withholding information from their company so that they might force their employer to value them. This is game playing and it is a dangerous game!
I once knew an employee that took files home and even took the check register home “by accident” on occasion because she felt under appreciated…The files were a goldmine if discovered by a competitor and the explosive nature of her personality made everything worse. She worked at the company for 30 years and was watching her status become less and less secure due to technology innovations mastered by the stream of college graduates recruited by the company.
Where handwritten invoices gave way to typewritten invoices she was there with a steady hand to guide the company through various stages…and she was thought to be the glue that kept it together…and customers loved her because she was the only constant as products and services came and went…and marketing reps came and went even more swiftly…
Then company mergers took place and mainframes and terminals came with it…and eventually the people at headquarters filled the duties that she used to perform…she was left with customer service functions…no more purchasing or contracts administrations.
Her name was Mary and people across the nation knew her as the best support person in the business…if you wanted to save money or get something in an emergency Mary was the only person you needed to get it done. Since the 1960’s she saw it all and knew it all…every manufacturing representative that wanted to penetrate the market went to see Mary first because she had the “black book” that contained hundreds of names and numbers for every industry in every state…she also had a powerful memory that could access personal information about many of her contacts…She held her position through years of changes in the industry….
Mary refused to retire…which was fine with her company because she had value that was hard to put a price on…but she had something else that she couldn’t quite contain…contempt for her company’s new way of doing business.
Instead of answering the phone and chatting with people she knew for years and coming and going as she pleased she was soon demoted to an administrative assistant that had her calls monitored. She grew tired of “coaching sessions” to improve her phone manners and selling techniques…she also resented being trained and supervised by people that teased her about her poor data entry skills…especially troubling was her supervisors were half her age.
Mary quietly seethed for her last few years as she endured the new company culture and she plotted her next move.
She still handled many of her company’s top clients because they insisted…but now she kept detailed handwritten notes that she kept in file folders that blended in with hundreds of other file folders…the difference was that she took these home…and they were never out of her sight.
The last time I saw her was when she quit…it was quiet however…she went to the break room, filled up her coffee cup like she always did at 10am…and put on a fake half smile as she passed by her coworkers and went to her desk where she gathered her things…she left her cup behind and some of us never saw her again. It was as if she needed to sneak out like a thief in the night….
She was stopped at the door by her boss who calmly said…”Give me the files Mary…go home” Withholding information written by Ken Bownes
