Loyalty Not Included

Modern workplace, and the behavior of everyone in it, has changed since the 50’s. Small businesses owners often find frustration in the perceived lack of gratitude and loyalty they get from employees that they feel they are treating like family. Conversely, employees often feel like they are being treated like children and compensated on a level of an allowance with talking down every time they break curfew (late to work) or make a mistake.

Bottom line is, there are some terrible people out there.

There are as many terrible bosses as there are terrible employees. There are mismatches between company culture and employee personality. The communication between the employees and managers sucks because the goal is performance, not alignment and nobody wants to do any more than they think they should.

What I’m trying to say is, life isn’t fair and sometimes the employees get screwed and sometimes the employer gets screwed. You as the employer make more money so you have to take more shit and grief for it. Sorry, it comes with territory.

Shit your employees will do to you

Strategically and intentionally sabotaging other employees, departments, products and services  they don’t like.

Quit with no notice.

Make all their worldly problems root in something you have unjustly done to them.

Ask for preferential treatment while complaining about the preferential treatment of others.

Consider professional criticism as a personal affront.

Know how to do your (and their managers and their coworkers) job better than you while being completely incompetent at the one they are assigned to.

Lie. Constantly. (Hint: Move them to sales)

Bring their home problems to work: From vacation and wedding planning to drug trafficking using your corporate UPS box (yes, it happened)

Ask you to pay for their training and immediately upon passing the exam ask for a promotion, raise and more.

What to do with shitty employees

Fucking fire their fucking ass right now.

I have to say that my biggest regret is not getting rid of bad people at the first opportunity I had. Unfortunately, at times I let the potential of the person to perform at their god given talent cloud the evidence that I should strap sticks of dynamite to their chest and shoot them out of a cannon Road Runner style.

Those homicidal feelings are normal.

Truth is, some of my best employees that are still with me after all of these years are the folks that understand the reality that everyone has a bad day, month even a year. It’s all about showing up, sometimes you win sometimes you lose but you show up again. People like that can see past their bosses mistakes and bosses can let the shit slide because hey, nobody is perfect and we don’t aim for perfection. This isn’t the military, we aren’t disarming a nuke. We’re killing emails advertising dick pills. Perspective.

Then there are bad people. And there are more bad people than good. So the next time you’re in a spot wondering what you did wrong… just take a deep breath and focus on moving forward. Take good with the bad and align people with your mission.

Treat people right and set the right expectations and keep on moving the ball towards the end zone.

Unless you’re sitting handcuffed in prison drenched in blood because you unloaded an AR-15 at work… it’s gonna be alright. So long as nobody got shot, everything is gonna be alright.

If that fails, remember that it’s good to be the king. It sure as hell beats working for someone else and nobody wants to go to jail.