After being on the bottom for most of my working life and then inventing a billion dollar plus engineering solution (the first Mac-based Render Farm) that would have helped our company revolutionize how talent gets discovered in this country, I got outright fired... for no reason than that I had stock. Worse, I had delivered this solution 92% under budget. That's right...not 92% of budget...UNDER budget... around $400k out of a $5M budget. Steve Jobs would have talked about my work, but I got dumped so that a VC could take all the stock for themselves.
So when my next (and last) gig was as a Manager of Information Systems for Oxygen (the cable channel when they actually did original programming based around empowering women and children), I focused on getting being a manager right.
I even put my job on the line when one of my crew, doing the job they were trained to do, had a computer crash and lose a ton of financial information. The bookkeeper given the job of Head of Accounting had refused to use her private shared drive on the server after repeated written notifications. I told my guys to go back to the office after she yelled in their faces that she wanted them fired. I refused and said they'd have to fire me before that happened. Lucky for me, my boss was in NY and no one on the site had squat to say about my job.
I shut down the help desk and took my guys out to lunch every Friday on my dime. I expected them to work hard, but for my network engineer, network support tech and two IT guys, there were several instances where they got to see first hand that I had their backs. Moreover, I let them know I trusted them when we were implementing new things. I knew that at their level, jobs in tech could be transient, so it was important to always be building their resumes and I kept them focused on building their careers.
I knew I had done it right when my NY boss told me he never expected me to succeed because the job was so bad. He only hired me because he didn't trust the Manager from the SF office. I met every deliverable.
As for firing a guy, yeah, had to do that once and he earned every bit of it.
The guy was going to employees and talking bad about me to them. I had earned enough trust on the site that they told me what he had said. I called him in and formally counseled him, letting him know that I was perfectly willing to listen to any concerns or criticisms, but behind closed doors. We didn't air any dirty laundry in front of the employees who were for all intents and purposes, our customers.
But he continued talking trash, not mere criticisms, but outright denigration, calling me incompetent among other things and saying that he could do my job much better than me.
As if that weren't stupid enough, he was still on a temp contract. After I fired him, I had to tell his contractor WHY he was fired, so he was dumped immediately from the agency as well. I NEVER wanted to have to fire anyone, but...if there was ONE guy asking to be fired...it was him.
