Managing a Hostile Manager
When I was young and in college, I had to get co-ops as required as part of my degree program. A co-op is a fancy name for an internship meaning you get paid, which has become standard in the engineering field. Between my sophomore and junior year, I had an internship at Visteon at their axle manufacturing plant, and I was in for a wild ride and a grand lesson on handling hostile work environments.
The Axle Plant
The Axle plant was located in Sterling Heights and was formerly owned by Ford Motor Company until it spun off Visteon. Years after my internship, it went back under Ford ownership. It was a sprawling complex that had grown to 3,000,000 square feet or 68 acres of manufacturing space on a 171 acre lot. It took me 10 minutes to walk from my desk to the line I was helping out with. The plant manufacturers the majority of axles for all of Ford’s car lines.
That summer, I really didn’t know anything considering I only had two years of undergraduate. As an intern, I got no work, especially in 2004 when there was a downturn in the auto industry. The majority of work I got was from begging for scraps of work to fend off boredom. The biggest project I had was getting refrigerator units for old machines cleaned by maintenance. This involved handling people, and I ended up meeting all sorts of skilled trades peoples who did the actual work. This gave me an education for how the plant worked as well as an enjoyment of work by being social.
The other chunk of work came from my boss. He was either overly kind or overly angry, and as the summer wore on, I saw how people dealt with him. I reported to him, but he was actually a manager of managers. I’m not sure why an intern would report to him directly.
The Summer-time Task
His project for me was to determine how to replace the linear and rotary scales on old milling machines whenever they broke and weren’t replaceable (i.e. you couldn’t buy that linear scale again). Many of the machines in the plant were 30 or 40 years old. The true cost of those machines was the maintenance costs, and the maintenance crews kept the plant running smoothly. Some of these machines would fail for no reason whatever, and some times, it required an engineer to come out and slowly work out a bug from an ancient machine.
As I set about my task, I had trouble figuring out if I was supposed to make a manual for how to do this or write code. I would ask in email and in person. He never responded in writing, and it turns out, he rarely would respond in writing to anyone. It was not a good sign because it allows someone to change their mind and not have any documentation to say otherwise.
It seemed whatever I would do, when I would meet with him, I was doing the wrong thing. I was very confused, and looking back, I think this was the point. He was either maliciously changing his mind to confuse me on purpose or he was negligent in his ever changing mind. Either way, it quickly became a hostile work environment.
I set about my task, trying to apply myself as best as I could. I read up about linear scales. A linear scale uses light and defraction patterns to get highly accurate movement measurements to the tune of 5 micrometers. These are required to cut parts to be within an engineering specification.
I found out there were as many different types of scales as you could imagine, which if combined with the variety of machines using them, there was an overwhelming amount of these to deal with when trying to replace one.
As I reached out to the maintenance crews, I came to find out that not only do the electricians replace the linear scales when they break, they already handle replacing linear scales with different models. They already were accomplishing the job I was tasked with doing.
One-on-Ones
My boss didn’t take the news quite right. Maybe he didn’t understand. I don’t quite remember. I do remember the mid-summer review, and how much he berated me. It felt like 30 minutes or an hour of being yelled at and arguing with him. A newly graduated engineer was also in the room for that one. He used to come to our meetings, but he stopped because it was overwhelming for him. It was for me too.
As the summer worn on, I had a decision to make. If I meet with him at the beginning of the week, the subsequent yelling would ruin my week. If I met with him at the end of the week, it would ruin my weekend. It was difficult to navigate. I should have tried to not meet with him at all.
I think I shut down at some point, and I just tried to find something to do. I could have just read the news and taken the verbal abuse. I didn’t slack off because I felt proud of the work I was doing, whatever it was. So I worked to find more work, and I found some. I found some great people, and I really enjoyed a lot of work.
Turning Point
Every summer, the engineers usually took out the many interns to do some fun activity, but that year the plant had only two interns. They took us to do go-karting. While I was getting to know some people, I was asked how my internship was going.
Me: “I love the factory, the people especially. There isn’t much work for me, but the social aspect of the job is fun. I am finding some places to help out. Aside from my boss, this internship has been really enjoyable.”
Other person: “What was wrong with your boss?”
Me: “I meet with him once a week, and he yells at me. I have to decide whether I should ruin my week by meeting on a Monday or a weekend by meeting on a Friday. He always changes his mind, never puts anything into writing, and his expectations are a moving target.”
Other person: “I’m the head of Human Resources at the plant. Let’s talk about what we can do”
It was the intervention I wanted but was unsure how to get. I was new to the working world and unsure what was normal behavior for managers. I had the hostile work environment training at the beginning of my internship but didn’t remember it as the summer wore on.
This wonderful woman told me she could move me under someone else or I could stick it out for the last six weeks, and they would support me.
I decided to stick it out. He gave me a failing performance review that I refused to sign, and on my exit interview, I had a nice recap for the HR person. He never got an intern again, and I got another internship the next summer. I was angry for quite a while, but I got to have a great learning experience without harming my career because it was just an internship.
If you like, follow me on Twitter and YouTube where I post videos of espresso shots on different machines and espresso related stuff. You can also find me on LinkedIn where I’ve written extensively about my work experiences and professional development (which is often personal as well).
Further readings of mine:
How to run a marathon without training
Grandma died and turned into a goose, probably
The Tale of the Stolen Espresso Machine
Affordable Coffee Grinders: a Comparison
