Unreal Hypocrisy

My (former) colleague J told me she had a talk with my old boss a few weeks after I resigned. She asked him, "How do you think he'll like the new place?"

What did he say?

He said, "I think he'll find there's a lot of nepotism."

She told me about it. At the time he said it, I thought it was absurd. The place I was leaving had a significant amount of nepotism and familial hiring. It also worried me because one of the things I wanted to leave behind by going to the new organization I was moving to was the back-scratching, the politics, the nepotism, and the favoritism. The good news . . . I've been at my new company for a year. Not even a hint of nepotism or favoritism. There's one daughter-in-law of a senior manager who works in a department, and one husband-and-wife team who are both lower-level employees. But nothing beyond that. 

Regardless, as I said, when I heard about this statement, I thought it was absurd.

Why?

Well, because there seemed to be quite a bit of what he was claiming I would find at my new company. At that time, his wife (so the boss's wife) reported to me and was on retainer (none of our other leadership instructors were on retainer . . . nor did any of them make as much as she did). The wife of the a branch leader was a senior VP of the headquarters group. One of the trainers' wives was a VP of Operations. A son of one of my directors was an IT technician. There were several other "relationships" among the staff, sons and daughters, nephews, etc. But these are the ones I can remember off the cuff. 

Since I left, the VP of HR's husband became the COO. Today I learned that the husband of a VP of operations will become an leader in the account managment team. These are just two that are straight family relationships; I'm not even counting the ones where it's backscratching or "they're a friend of the company."

So, you can see why I thought what my old boss said was absurd. I thought the place was lousy with nepotism before . . . it's worse now. 

I wonder if it all stems from my boss and his wife. It becomes much harder to say "no" when your own wife is getting a paycheck from the company, right? How can someone say, "No, we need to reconsider that hire," when you're signing paychecks for your own wife?