Relative to the title of the piece, do you think "Steve" left the meeting thinking that Opsware is "a good place to work?" How about during the meeting? I think there's a failure somewhere within the technique Ben employed to impart the values that he thinks are important, not to mention blindness to the possibility that he himself might be an obstacle in creating "a good place to work."
Its an excellent question. I know if I were "Steve" in this scenario I'd feel bad that I had so misread something that was very important to my boss. As with most things I would also be evaluating how I felt about it.
At Sun I worked briefly for a guy who was an incredible micro-manager. He would ask me to report on what my folks were doing, and then tell me what they should be doing so that I could meet the goals he had set out for me. I pushed back on that. My push back was that I felt I had a better handle on how to meet the goals than he did, I also recognized that if that wasn't something he could live with it was well within his rights to remove me (as I recall I even offered to proactively move at that point).
I completely agree with Ben's original assessment that part of making a place fun to work at is that you and your reports have a clear idea of what you're being asked to do, and your management supports your effort to get that done.
The part of this story that seems to trigger the most emotion is the notion that Ben brings this guy in, then drops this requirement on him with the consequence that if he doesn't do it in 24hrs he'll be out of a job. That level of clarity in direction is rare in my experience. It also read a bit like Ben was taking no responsibility for not communicating clearly the importance of this requirement. If I were Steve I would want to understand that better. But we don't know what sort of 1:1s that Ben and Steve had prior to this one. Perhaps it came up often and Steve made vague affirmative noises about how he would get around to it soon or something. And only after repeated nudges did Ben come out and make this clear delineation of behavior and consequence.
> The part of this story that seems to trigger the most emotion is the notion that Ben brings this guy in, then drops this requirement on him with the consequence that if he doesn't do it in 24hrs he'll be out of a job. That level of clarity in direction is rare in my experience. It also read a bit like Ben was taking no responsibility for not communicating clearly the importance of this requirement. If I were Steve I would want to understand that better. But we don't know what sort of 1:1s that Ben and Steve had prior to this one. Perhaps it came up often and Steve made vague affirmative noises about how he would get around to it soon or something. And only after repeated nudges did Ben come out and make this clear delineation of behavior and consequence.
That's technically possible, but that's pretty much opposite to how Ben himself told it. Here's the condensed version of the backstory:
> one day while I happily went about my job, it came to my attention that one of my managers hadn’t had a 1:1 with any of his employees in over six months... I did not expect this.
> I thought that leading by example would be the sure way to get the company to do what I wanted... why didn’t they pick up my good habits?
> Given the large number of things that we were trying to accomplish, managers couldn’t get to everything and came up with their own priorities. Apparently, this manager didn’t think that meeting with his people was all that important and I hadn’t explained to him why it was so important.
There is no hint at all of the situation you envision. That isn't to say you're definitely wrong, but you're certainly on shakier ground than Ed.
