the luxury cabin, the clueless Christmas card, and other stories of wildly out-of-touch company executives

[ResidentialBusiness]

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

Last week we talked about out-of-touch executives. Here are 12 of the most outrageous stories you shared. (Also, if you’ve never wanted to eat the rich before, warning that you might after reading these stories.)

1. The renovation

The head of the org I work for has been complaining about his home renovations for months. I get it, he had to move out of his house and … (checks notes) into the *other* property he owns.

This has been happening while several employees are dealing with being illegally ousted from their rentals due to landlords not legally following the lead abatement process. But yes, your kitchen renovation that you chose to do, and temporary move into your own home is also clearly traumatic too.

2. The photo

I worked at a company once where every year the owners would throw a party right before Christmas. To be fair, it was nice. It was a two-hour catered lunch in outside tents, and they honored all the employees who hit milestones. However, where they were a bit out of touch was with their gifts for the milestones. Mostly it was branded stuff, but I remember one year for the person who had been with the company 20 years, the owners praised the employee and then started talking about how they, the owners, always go on vacation to beautiful locations and how they wished they could share that with everyone. At this point, my friend is convinced this lucky employee is about to get tickets for a trip or a cruise or similar. But nope! What the employee got for their 20-year anniversary with the company was a framed photo collage of the owner’s vacation, complete with the owners in shot.

3. Calling in “cold”

We got a very stern lecture about the importance of coming into the office and mandatory in-person attendance from an exec who was herself calling in remotely (to the mandatory, in-person meeting) because it was “too cold.”

4. The luxury cabin

In 2020 I was working at a place with a VERY unpopular leader, who decided to pass the pandemic by renting a luxurious cabin in the mountains for her family (she had college aged kids who were normally away). Every all staff meeting she would dial in with the giant stone fireplace in the background and talk about how wonderful it was to spend this precious time with her family and luxuriating in nature.

You can imagine how well this went over with the rest of the staff, many of whom were separated from their family and friends, had sick loved ones, etc. Most of us did NOT have the resources to relocate to a luxury vacation rental!

5. The recommendation

During his first all staff meeting, the COO said he had taken the last two years off before this job and that he highly recommended we all do it.

6. The car delivery

Large local employer was failing, pretty spectacularly. My spouse was still working there and I had left about a year earlier. Many, many people in the community had purchased stock (and were watching the stock prices tumble).

During the week of another round of layoffs, the relatively new CEO had her brand-new luxury vehicle delivered to the main office (which was nearly all windows). It was unloaded right out front in the fire lane while employees watched. My spouse was not certain, but felt it was utter cluelessness, rather than dickishness.

7. The Christmas card

For Christmas 2008, when the Great Recession was kicking into high gear, our CEO had a Christmas card made that was a cut-out hanging mobile of the places around the world he and his family had visited in 2008, with illustrations of cities and airplanes and his family. That went over well.

8. The trivia game

The CEO of our division just had an all-hands meeting, where we had to play trivia about her. Vote on where she was born, how many coffees she drank per day, and which netflix shows she binged. Twenty minutes of that, with thousands of employees. One of the most tone deaf and expensive meetings I’ve ever been too, especially since there was nothing about our business strategy or results.

9. The “opportunity”

VP said in a staff meeting that another VP’s recent death was an opportunity to reorganize.

10. The tip

During Covid, my country was in extended lockdown. We had an all-hands meeting intended to be a check-in on our welfare, where a senior staff member shared their tips on managing working remotely. Their tip was to keep their work items like their headset in a little bag, so whichever room in the house they were working from, they could take the bag and be sure they had everything they needed with them.

We had junior staff living in shared houses, working standing up over an ironing board because they didn’t have any private space other than their own tiny room, which was too small to even fit a table. Leaving work items in other rooms of our large homes was not something that was a cause for concern for most of us.

11. The women’s talk

The CEO gave a talk to our women’s professional group. So: the audience was his female employees. When asked about women that had helped shape his career, he couldn’t name any and said something along the lines of “all the women i’ve ever worked with got pregnant and stopped working.”

12. The rock star

I used to work at a place where the CEO would come into an all-hands meeting with flashing lights and loud music playing (Rocky theme song maybe? I forget) and all the employees were supposed to applaud and cheer.

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