Boss, You Look Ill
(What We Mean Is:
Beat It, Phlegm Boy)
---
Cold and Flu Season Brings
Plague of Sick Supervisors
Who Refuse to Go Home

By Alex Markels
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
01/18/95

His subordinates dubbed him "The Germ With Legs." But no matter how much they cajoled him, no matter how much they shamed him, Ted Thornton wouldn't abandon his office.

"Go home, Germ!" said office manager Alla Smirnova when Mr. Thornton was ailing two weeks ago. "You're going to make me sick."

"Beat it," pleaded sales representative Eric Bocanegra. "You look like an extra from `The Night of the Living Dead.'"

Wheezing and hacking, Mr. Thornton ignored it all. The 29-year-old president of Interdependent Computer Solutions, a New York computer reseller, says he is obsessed with productivity and feared he would lose sales.

The cough and sneeze season has returned, and in tow the workaholic bosses who won't stay home when they are sick. Of course, anyone who insists on spreading germs is an office menace, but bosses are the worst. They are the ones most likely to consider themselves indispensable -- and they are the hardest to control.

No office seems to be immune. At the New York City Department of Health, associate commissioner Steven Matthews readily admits to showing up at work when he is feeling under the weather. "I grew up in a house where you had to be really sick before my mother would let you stay home," he says. "I guess I ended up with the same kind of work ethic." Indeed, he started the new year by nursing a nasty cold in the office.

Meanwhile, his office manager, Linda Ciecirski, has just returned from being out sick. She says she doesn't blame him for her own recent miserable bout -- but she has taken to spraying her phone with Lysol (sometimes he uses her line).

Even authorities on the flu, the people whose job means they know better, breeze into work like walking petri dishes. Nancy Cox, the Centers for Disease Control's influenza expert, says she can't succumb to the flu season, because that is just the time she is under intense deadline pressure to formulate the next season's vaccine. "That motivates me to come to work even if I'm sick," she says. She maintains she would be loath to show up with something serious, but adds: "If it's only a cold, I might risk exposing co-workers."

At least Dr. Cox keeps to herself. "If she's not feeling well, she pretty much stays in her office, which is a far cry from other managers I've had," says microbiologist Cathy Bender. She adds that her last boss, a department head at Atlanta's Emory University, not only routinely came to work "sick as a dog," but brought his sick children into the office, too.

"I'm sure he passed a bug on to me," declares Ms. Bender. But aside from telling him he had no business spreading his family's ailments around the office, Ms. Bender says she felt helpless to do anything about it.

She is one of the brave ones; few employees concerned about their careers want to tell a sickly boss to get lost. Lots of people simply suffer in silence; others say it doesn't matter if they do complain, because the boss ignores them anyway.

A few take desperate steps. When one haggard but stubborn magazine editor in Connecticut refused to go home -- he had viral pneumonia -- an office worker went to the head of the company. The chief executive then marched into the editor's office and pointed him toward the door.

"That was the only thing that would make him leave," confides the subordinate, who felt too timid to confront the editor. "Unfortunately, he had already infected another worker."

Of course, in a world of crowded restaurants and drooling toddlers, it's virtually impossible to avoid exposure to germs and viruses somewhere. Plus, trying to stop the spread of a "bug" in an office is like trying to curb gossip -- but experts say there's good reason to try.

"Office buildings can be incubators for infectious disease," says Rupert Burtan, a Denver-based expert in occupational medicine. He blames everything from poor ventilation to dirty utensils, but sneezy executives top the list. "I've seen 40% of a 1,000-person work force call in sick mostly because people insist on staying at work," he says.

To send diligent but pestilent bosses packing, Dr. Burtan recommends giving them a dose of their own medicine: "Tell them how inefficient it is to have half the office out sick. It's simply a matter of cutting your losses. It just doesn't pay to stay in the office."

Stanley Bing, author of the book "Crazy Bosses," recommends more extreme measures. "You've got to employ a little counterterrorism," says Mr. Bing, himself a manager. "When he comes in your office, put on a surgical mask or wear a bandana over your face."

Not that such blunt messages would work with Mr. Bing. "When I get sick, the only way to get me out of the office is to physically eject me," he says. "I literally walk around the office honking and wheezing until everyone asks, `Why didn't you go home two days ago?' I can't make that decision on my own; I need consensus. It's part of being a bureaucrat."

Ellen Bravo, executive director at 9to5, a national association of working women, favors a gentler approach. "Managers rarely welcome criticism about their business decisions, let alone their personal behavior," says Ms. Bravo. "I'd suggest being low key, sending them a personal note of concern about their health and maybe add a little suggestion that you don't want to get sick, either."

Ms. Bravo talks a good game. But she sheepishly admits to having had such a bad cold at work last week that she emptied a subordinate's box of Kleenex. Ms. Bravo says she replaced the tissues the next morning. "I believe the top people should set an example," she says. Yet she believes a manager's insistence on coming to work sick points to a deeper management problem: "This is really about a failure to broaden authority and empower workers," she says.

At Interdependent Computer Solutions, the only worker empowered enough to curb Mr. Thornton, the relentlessly sick boss, was his spouse. Theresa Rivera-Thornton, the company treasurer, scheduled a doctor's appointment for her husband and shoved him out the office door.

Healthy again, Mr. Thornton says his recent illness did teach him one valuable lesson: "My drive to stay productive backfired on me when other people got sick after I did. Now I'm shorthanded."

So will he go home the next time he is feeling under the weather?

"No way," he says. "I just won't get sick."