Member-only story
An E-Mail I Never Intended to Send
Beware Those Distribution Lists
In my younger days, back when climbing the corporate ladder seemed the most important thing in the world, I managed a large staff in a medical business office. When most people hear “medical business office” they picture two or three people at the front desk of their local doctor’s office, or perhaps even the five or six that you talk to when you check out of the hospital. This was not that.
The company I worked for is now one of the largest in the world and will obviously remain unnamed since they employ more lawyers than the Justice Department. At the time I was there they had not yet reached this level, but were well on their way. Thus, my staff was not five or six employees, but over 100; they spent all day, every day, doing nothing but posting medical insurance payments to patients’ accounts, tens of millions of dollars every month.
Today, with advances in automated posting software, the same job can be done by a handful of people, but we had not reached that technological breakthrough yet. So, in order to get all that money where it was supposed to go, I had five supervisors under me, an admin, and those 100 or so employees.
Obviously, any group that large is going to have issues, both professional and personal. The supervisors provided a buffer for…
