We have been watching CBS’s new reality show, UNDERCOVER BOSS, with great interest. The series purports to put “out of touch” CEOs back in touch with the day-to-day dealings of their companies. The undercover bosses (such as Hooters CEO Coby Brooks and Waste Management president and COO Larry O’Donnell) pretend to be part of a documentary about entry-level jobs in order to get out of the board room and down into the trenches.
As one of the title cards says during the opening credits: THEY WILL DISCOVER THE TRUTH.
On Sunday February 21st, the show featured 7-Eleven president and CEO Joe DePinto, a West Point graduate with working-class roots who worked his way up the organization. After a brief make-under in which he swaps snazzy suit for schlumpy jeans, five o’clock shadow and glasses, DePinto is ready to take on jobs ranging from making coffee to making donuts to helping customers to making deliveries.
What was nice about the DePinto episode from a Results-Only Work Environment perspective was that the CEO got to see firsthand what we’re constantly advocating whenever we meet with distrustful leadership. Contrary to what your paranoia might be telling you, most of the employees in an organization are not lazy, unethical thieves, but decent people who want to do a good job. (Obviously this truism doesn’t apply to the Hooters manager who makes his waitresses eat beans off a plate without using their hands before they can end their shift.)
In the DePinto episode, we also got to see how (surprise!) human 7-Eleven employees are, what with their problems (missing a kidney, never seeing their wife) and dreams (of being an artist, of not working at 7-Eleven). While DePinto isn’t completely insulting in his amazement at the fullness of their lives, he is “woken up” to the fact that they they aren’t getting what they need from the organization. As he tells his board toward episode’s end “Every single employee I met was amazing. What we have to do is support them.”
So far, so good. And then things go completely crazy.
For the “reveal”, DePinto meets with four of the employees who especially touched his life. He thanks them and praises them, and then proceeds to try to make their dreams come true and their problems go away.
To the employee who wants a career beyond 7-Eleven, DePinto offers to become his lifelong mentor. He gives another employee the chance to freelance his artwork for the company’s marketing department. The delivery driver who never sees his wife wins a vacation. The woman who is missing a kidney and is waiting for a donor will be honored with a system-wide donor awareness program to encourage customers to fill out organ donor cards.
This is not a knock on the 7-Eleven employees. They’re fine people. And if anyone is going to benefit from a television show, we’re not going to object.
But isn’t there something inherently arrogant about how these people are recognized? To hear the employees tell it, they were simply doing their job. They were kind and decent to DePinto (just as DePinto was kind and decent in return) because that’s who they are.
They didn’t ask for the CEO of their company to swoop in and make it all better. And while there is genuine gratitude on their part, they also give off an uneasy vibe as if they’re not sure what this all means. (How do you thank someone for such an improbable gift? How do you return the favor?)
UNDERCOVER claims to be about CEOs getting real, but it really trades in the same old myths that gets companies into trouble in the first place. The idea at work here is that the CEO–provided he or she gets the right information–knows exactly what to do.
The CEO is the smartest, wisest, most strategic–and in the case of UNDERCOVER BOSS magical–person in the entire organization. But the irony here is that with the exception of one moment where corporate wasn’t properly responding to a maintenance call, everything at the stores was working just fine. So hats off to DePinto for making the rounds, but don’t kid yourself. You’ve made a nice difference in some people’s lives, but you might not be as powerful as you think.
