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    Tim Krohn

March 6, 2010

Bosses go undercover, but you can see right through them

By Tim Krohn The Free Press

The first episode of the TV show “Undercover Boss,” which aired following the Super Bowl, was a disheartening window into the mind and soul of corporate leadership.

The premise of the show: A corporate CEO changes his looks and slips anonymously into the lowest-level jobs in his company. Other employees are told the cameras are there to film a documentary about entry-level jobs.

The show intends to give us a view of a kinder, gentler, post-AIG CEO who is willing to get in the trenches and “aw shucks” his way through a shift, learning valuable lessons to make his company better. 

Instead, it offers confirmation that, A) too many clueless blowhards work or inherit their way into the corner office, or B) too many people who work their way into the corner office become clueless blowhards.      

In the first episode, the CEO of Waste Management was shocked — shocked — to learn that one of the office staff needed a second job to make ends meet.

He rounds out the day on the job by complaining that his back hurts and throwing a raise at one employee.

Nice, I guess, but hardly the systemic change needed to improve the company’s productivity or correct pay inequities.

On another episode, Dave Rife, the great-grandson of the founder of the White Castle hamburger chain, proves why inherited wealth doesn’t mean you inherit the business acumen that built the wealth.

The pampered CEO, who brags about his assortment of sports cars and toys, finds a poorly managed White Castle filled with employees whose morale has long ago been shattered. 

While the Waste Management honcho at least threw out a pay raise — as meaningless as it was — the entitled Rife could come up with nothing more than slogans. At the end of the show, Rife told an employee who had recently suffered a heart attack that he would start a “wellness program” and told another underpaid, harried night-shift worker that he would start a “leaders of tomorrow” program.

Sure, health insurance and a merit-based pay-raise system would have been nice, but Rife has more toys to buy.

In another episode, the CEO of Hooters was particularly oblivious. While handing out chicken on the street, he was shocked to learn from women that most of them believe Hooters degraded females.

He later pledged to work diligently on changing the chain’s reputation and making the restaurants more “family friendly.”

It’s difficult to know exactly where you’d start in making a place more family friendly when it’s called Hooters.

The CEOs, after a day of working and being surprised at the problems their policies and actions have created, empathize with employees and promise to work toward improvement.

Of course, none of them can get a real understanding of a job in a day. And none of them can have any concept of the ongoing, daily struggles, worries and stresses their workers face.

If any of them really do attempt “change,” you know how it will go. The executives will have a retreat and bring in a “facilitator” to which half of them won’t listen. The other half will create lists of “action items” they will burden their employees with, further crushing morale and harming productivity.

“Undercover Boss” is supposed to give us hope of a new corporate culture in the aftermath of our greed-driven Great Recession.

Instead, it just gives you a great depression.



Tim Krohn is a Free Press staff writer. He can be contacted at 344-6383 or tkrohn@mankatofreepress.com.

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