Well, I would love to report that positive progress has been made in the situation. Unfortunately I cannot. I arrived at the scheduled meeting on Wednesday afternoon and immediately noticed things were 'different.' As I sat in a conference room, alone, waiting for the other parties, the loud conversation from the office next door was coming through the walls and I actually felt embarrassed being there at that moment. A few minutes after the noise died down the GM walks in with the owner. NO QA manager.
Well, all the conflict resolution training, all the papers and books I poured over to come up with methods to work on the problems to eliminate them, all the positive ideas I was ready to apply - all out the window. Here is what happened:
A customer had called the company to schedule an audit of the facility. Instead of referring the customer to the QA manager (their documentation clearly states that all audits are scheduled through QA) the GM took the call and scheduled the audit according to his schedule. Apparently, after this, the customer calls back needing to reschedule and the call was put through to the QA manager. Well the GM had not said anything about the initial call to the QA manager so he knew nothing about it. Apparently without letting on to the customer that he was not aware of the initial scheduling, the QA manager accepted the reschedule dates. It was a week between the original schedule call and the reschedule call.
The QA manager approached the GM on this and the GM claims he had no choice in making the schedule, the customer called him and there were a lot of other things discussed and that he 'simply' forgot to tell the QA manager. This infuriated the QA manager to the point that the heated discussion I overheard through the walls was the QA manager making his last plea to the GM to let him do his job. Not getting a satisfactory answer, the QA manager walked out. He did not return on Thursday or Friday. I spoke to him Friday afternoon and he says he is not going back and in fact on Thursday was offered another job and he took it (according to him - anyone want a job?)
The GM's take: "The QA manager was not worth his salary. We paid him a lot of money and all he had were ideas about changing. Not everything is improvement you know! ISO isn't everything. This is not about quality." (meantime the company has lost almost 50% of it's market share - directly attributable to poor quality - the reason they hired the QA manager and went for ISO in the first place.)
The owners take: "If someone wants to leave the company I cannot make him stay. He was bright, creative and obviously good at what he does. He did a lot for us in getting ISO - we would not have it otherwise. It is just too bad he could not see things like **** (the GM)." (not sure what she is thinking with this one. With seeing what little I did of documentation to support the loss of market share and the state of quality, better than 75% of it can be attributed to the GM's lack of responsibility. The owner is insistent on keeping him as GM because he is very knowledgeable on their product even though he demonstrates little or no managerial or leadership skills.)
I called the QA manager at home and spoke to him. We met Friday evening outside of the work place. He just wanted to let me know his side of the whole story. And what a side it turned out to be. Of course I cannot substantiate a lot of what he relayed to me - no objective proof without returning to the company - but it all seemed entirely plausible and more than likely entirely true. It would be way to long a story to relay here.
So, before writing this post I finished my final report to the owner. Since my subsequent involvement was as a mediator and there is no longer a situation to mediate, I terminated my working relationship with the company. On Friday the owner and GM, very seriously offered me the QA position. I very politely declined. The QA managers story is quite a story - a horror story. Every QA managers worst nightmare.
Not sure what the lesson here is for everyone. I was hoping there would be a more equitable solution to the problem. I know that the relationship between the QA manager and other management can be a very strained one at times simply due to the different outlooks and approaches used. Personally I feel the GM is wrong in his position, attitude and actions and cannot believe that he is in the position he is in. I feel the QA manager, although more in the right here, needs to learn how better to approach a conflict and better interpersonal problem solving skills. The owner, now here is a different story. I cannot believe that the owner wants to keep the GM after he has shown how he can diminish the business and the moral of employees (there are many others that are not happy with the GM) and would be willing to let the QA manager go without any attempt at all to keep him when he was the first in many years to show that profits could be increased, scrap could be reduced and customers could be won back and retained.