The day I learned I’m too Oldie for the curse of modern managers
Rueful – and hilarious – account of how ludicrous culture of employment disciplinary hearings made a veteran editor (b.1937) throw in the towel
THREE days ago I announced my resignation as editor of The Oldie, a magazine I had edited since its launch way back in 1992.
I had many happy years working with some brilliant people but in the end I was unable to cope with the demands of the modern management man, personified by the magazine’s publisher, one James Pembroke.
Let me be fair to the man – Pembroke has done wonders for the magazine, which now boasts a circulation of 45,000. But alarm bells started to ring some time ago when he began to hanker after ‘brainstorming’ sessions and covered the office walls with charts showing blue and yellow days for different members of staff.
Things came to a head more recently when I started questioning his application for Arts Council funds to subsidise one of his pet projects, the Soho Literary Festival. There was a noisy board meeting at which I was told to watch my step.
A few days later James summoned me to a meeting to discuss the decline in The Oldie’s sales figures on the newsstand and their relationship to the magazine’s covers.
I replied that I could see no point in a meeting as the issue had already been gone over at an editorial meeting attended by all the staff.
To my amazement I then received a three-page letter from James summoning me to a ‘disciplinary hearing’ and warning me: ‘If you are found guilty of misconduct I may decide to issue you with a written warning or a final written warning.’ (What was the difference?)
Misconduct apparently consisted of my failure to attend meetings (the main purpose of most enterprises today).
As for my claim that the covers issue had already been raised, James said that he had cut the discussion short ‘to save the staff further distress’.
The letter seemed to have been written in accordance with some manual of modern management. But the trouble with doing this sort of thing by the book, ie not in accordance with the dictates of common sense, is that the rules can turn out to be nasty potholes for the unwary.
Thus James, following, I presume, the official guidelines for disciplinary hearings, informed me: ‘If you want to call any relevant witnesses to the hearing please let me have their names as soon as possible and no later than Thursday.’ A fatal
Alarm bells rang when he began asking for brainstorming sessions
move from matey’s point of view. For it opened the possibility to call all of my staff who had attended that editorial meeting at which they had been caused ‘distress’, according to his version of events. Now it was open to me, again according to the rules, to cross-examine them as to the truth of this assertion.
But this was the very last thing that James wanted. He had been hoping that the staff of The Oldie, working in a small open-plan office in Fitzrovia, Central London, would remain in ignorance of the fact that their editor was being summoned to a disciplinary meeting to answer charges of misconduct – a matter that could seriously affect their future employment.
When I told him who my witnesses were going to be, he was appalled. This was quite unacceptable and would have only one consequence. It would cause them all yet further distress. How could I be so heartless?
Yet the only person being caused
distress was poor James himself. But it was all his fault for following the regulations laid down for disciplinary hearings.
Apart from witnesses I was informed that I was entitled to bring a trade union representative to the meeting. Yet my tormentor was presumably well aware that there was no trade union, no National Union of Oldie Operatives, no shop stewards. Once again he was simply going by the book and making himself look ridiculous in the process.
The final absurdity was the following information: ‘If you have any specific needs at the hearing as a result of a disability, please contact me as soon as possible.’
Wasn’t it tempting to play on my extreme old age and invent an only recently diagnosed affliction of Tourette’s, or chronic deafness, which would require my interrogators to supply me with an ear trumpet?
Perhaps a more salient disability from the point of view of the oneman tribunal – his fellow directors were unavailable that day – was a debilitating sense of humour that caused me to break into unquenchable laughter when confronted by such a futile rigmarole.
In the end the thought of it was too much for me. At my age the lure of disciplinary hearings, never high on my list of life’s pleasures, is not what it was. I decided to walk and almost immediately felt a great sense of relief.
I was walking away not just from James Pembroke but from an absurd management world in which people are tying themselves up in knots in order to conform to the rulebook.
And the alarming thing about all this is that James is no computercontrolled robot. Ex-Harrow and Cambridge (even a member of the Garrick Club), he is a privileged member of the educated elite, the sort of person who in days gone by the nation looked to for leadership and guidance.
What hope is there for Britain if the privileged Pembrokes of this world feel they have to conform to ludicrous procedures, which make them look like idiots and drive the likes of me to retreat to the country in the hope of a few final years of peace and quiet with our loved ones?