Spooky Leadership And Management Mistakes That Scare Your People Away

By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

I was working for a company in New York City at a weekly meeting with 20 other people when what we call “9/11 “happened. The owner of the firm didn’t tell us what was unfolding around us. I had no way of getting home easily without hitchhiking. Consultants who worked for me were in the World Trade Center and unreachable by phone. I couldn’t speak with my wife because cell phone service wasn’t working in Manhattan. As I walked and walked and walked with tens of thousands of others, I saw the smoldering site where the buildings once stood. Later that day, I received a phone call from my boss telling me to come to work the next day. He also told me I was an idiot for not having sold disaster recovery services to one of the nearby companies whose building was destroyed even though my company had no capabilities in the area.

This happened to me. Some of you may have experienced something like this during the early days of COVID, when you might have been encouraged to risk your life to go to work. I know my son went through something like that with his employer, who demanded he commute into Manhattan when over 800 people a day were dying from the virus, and he was someone with an asthma history that put him at risk.