At a point previously in my career, I worked in an environment where
the tradition was to give Christmas gifts to your direct manager and
the people who reported to you. In my first year in management in this
environment, I had six 'front line contributors' reporting to me (that
was the fancy term for the employees at the bottom of the hierarchy).
So right before Christmas that year, I went to the bookstore and
bought six copies of a motivational page-a-day calender to distribute
to my staff as my gift to them.
Well, someone said to me at the time "Why would you do that? They
don't like you, they don't respect you, and they make your job
difficult. If I were you I wouldn't give them anything." So I returned
the somewhat expensive gifts and gave them something else instead that
was so small I don't even remeber what it was.
However, to this day I remember exactly what they gave me! Five
dollars worth of lottery scratch off tickets in a Christmas card.
I'll give you a minute to do the math.
Yep, that work's out to one dollar from each of them, including the 99
cents for the card. Clearly, their thoughts of me were just about the
same as my thoughts of them. I was insulted and let a lot of my fellow
management members know about this. I my mind I was a better manager
than they were employees.
However in true holiday fashion, the spirit of Christmas Future took
mercy on me. One of my scratch off lottery tickets was a $100 dollars
winner. The moral of the story - give better holiday gifts to your
managers.
