Reader: I work at a family-owned company, with about 25 employees, all remote. We make widgets. I am in charge of manufacturing; I have been in this business for about 35 years, at this company for eight years. The CEO/owner has little interest in, or knowledge of, the manufacturing process. He occasionally wants something done that’s simply impossible or incredibly costly, and gets frustrated when I try to explain that to him. I can usually work around it, but lately he’s become increasingly concerned about costs.
All widgets have to be reviewed by a trained widget-checker. Larger places have an in-house person doing this. We outsource it to a firm that does excellent work but is expensive. The CEO wants me to give a lot of the widget-checking work to his wife, who works on various projects here but has little knowledge of widget-checking.
I gave her a few to review and she did a poor job, with little enthusiasm. The CEO thinks his wife can do it and ignores my advice that it takes years to become a good widget-checker. I don’t have time to train her.
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Fortunately, this doesn’t involve health or safety, but it will lead to embarrassment when we send low-quality widgets to our clients. This makes the sales staff furious. Should I just let this happen and let the CEO face the consequences? Push back more? The CEO doesn’t admit his mistakes easily.
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Karla: I’m tempted to say you should let him face the consequences — except that you and everyone else in the splash zone will get scalded as well.
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I also wonder what his wife/employee has to say about being made to fill in on jobs that her husband/boss is too cheap to outsource.
The quickest resolution would be for her to refuse to do this work she’s not good at and doesn’t enjoy. You could nudge that outcome along with diplomatic but relentless feedback until she gets fed up and calls it quits. But that would mean committing time you don’t have to overseeing her, not to mention putting you in the dicey position of critiquing your boss’s spouse.
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A blunter approach would be for you to show your boss examples of poor-quality widgets slipping past his wife’s reviews, and ask him if he is satisfied with that quality going out to clients. But that’s using the boss’s wife to rub his nose in his mistakes, which is another position she doesn’t deserve to be put in.
You may be able to enlist the wife’s aid in convincing her husband that the work he’s assigned her is best left to the experts. Your success there depends on your rapport with her, her ability to navigate her husband’s obstinacy and his willingness to accept business advice from his spouse.
But if you want a solution that doesn’t turn on using the boss’s wife as leverage, you can show the boss the outcome of his poor decisions in cold, hard data while there’s still time to change course.
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You can force that reckoning by collaborating with your marketing and customer service colleagues to gather and present feedback from focus groups and existing clients on professionally reviewed versus substandard widgets.
Denote their dissatisfaction in dollar amounts by calculating the projected cost of replacements, repairs and refunds for dissatisfied clients. Then compare those amounts against the cost of outsourcing to professional widget-checkers who are trained and contractually obligated to ensure that every product meets client expectations.
Your goal is to present the owner with a straightforward either/or scenario: Either we spend $X up front to ensure quality, or we spend $Y afterward to preserve client goodwill.
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Depending on how specialized this widget-checking is, your marketing allies may also be able to research competitor firms, or negotiate with your current vendor, to find an alternative that would appease the boss’s concerns about cost.
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It’s possible that the hard data will show that $X spent on quality assurance exceeds the $Y cost of compensating for substandard work, and the CEO will be content to make that trade-off to save a few bucks. That kind of corner-cutting is shortsighted, but it’s also the kind of unilateral call the owner of a family business is empowered to make.
In that case, it may be time for you to do your own cost-benefit analysis. What do you get from this employer that makes it worth the effort to have to talk him out of harebrained cost-cutting measures? Can you take pride in your work, knowing that your boss has a lower threshold for quality than you do?
Can you find something to respect in a business owner who seems determined to fly that business by the seat of his pants? Do you feel respected as a professional by a boss who thinks his untrained family member is a reasonable substitute for experienced professionals?
Finally, are you accepting some cut corners on your own job satisfaction? Sometimes taking a hard look at the trade-offs we’re making can help us make peace with gnawing dissatisfaction, or spur us to change the terms we’ve accepted.
