6 Lies Businesses Tell Themselves That Inevitably Harm a Company

6 Lies Businesses Tell Themselves That Inevitably Harm a Company

Okay, so having worked across many industries in differing levels of authority in a diverse set of businesses and organizations, I’ve learned a thing or two about business. This is by no means a comprehensive article. It is in fact, a very unfair article because it only looks at one side. But given the complexity and scope of issues affecting businesses, its even grossly inadequate to represent one side, so one thing at a time. Companies ideally are run by heartfelt people who understand humanity and know what it’s like to be an employee working for someone else. They have complete respect for their fellow man no matter who he is and care as much about their people as they do about the bottom line. In reality, that’s not always the case. In fact, there are times it is clearly and definitively not the case. This concerns those times, and yet, these are things it seems most companies struggle with.

1.  It is perfectly acceptable and safe to fix new problems or respond to new changes by adding more work. This can also be done to increase general productivity by consolidating work into fewer positions.

There are two real types of planners in the world, those who know how to caste a vision that will develop a plan that is both beautiful and disaster proof and begin building it, and those who just say “screw it” build stuff and spend the rest of eternity putting out fires to protect it.

It is safe to say, executives and managers are no different. The best execs I ever worked with or for seemed to just have a plan, go with it and for some wonderful reason, problems either never seemed to derail us or when they did, the structure was in place to handle them efficiently and without great casualty. On the other hand, I also worked for execs or supervisors who started with a structure and every time something went wrong or the owner asked them to “fix a problem” their thought was “BAM, NEW POLICY!” or better “BAM! NEW PROCEDURE AND LOTS MORE PAPERWORK!” In fact, every new initiative was followed with more work while maintaining all the other procedures because we have to keep everything fixed, right? And of course there isn't even time to see if the changes work because they never work fast enough and changes have to be made every minute its not "fixed".

The problem here is that the job turns employees (and managers) into policy machines. Oddly enough, the policies and procedures designed to increase results and productivity actually left less time and energy for the employees and managers to focus on results and productivity. It makes sense. Harry sits at a kiosk and spends 1 hour doing procedures and 6 helping customers giving them his full attention and charm, you know, shaking hands and kissing babies. But later, Harry now spends 3 hours doing procedures and 4 helping the same amount of customers. Now I’m not a math major but that seems like less attention to each customer and Harry will feel the strain of having to complete those procedures and follow those policies constantly. The result is a less energetic and less helpful Harry. Which makes Harry’s manager mad that his performance is slipping and in typical executive fashion feels it’s his duty to let Harry know there’s no excuses and demand he “rise to the occasion”. Turns out, Harry resents that.

There is one thing adding more work is good for, getting rid of people. Workplaces that pile on workloads have high turnover, and it increases as the workload increases. Turns out people are less inclined to do jobs that have higher expectation for the same payout. Now in the end, you will lose Lazy Lucy, because she doesn’t want to work harder, which is fine. But you will also lose Hard working Hannah, who is frustrated that more is required of her with less reward and more reprimand for lack of performance.

The only way to counter this is to hire new people who come in with new expectations about what the job is. Of course that just means you are constantly having to retrain new people who fumble the job even more leading the executives to put out more fires. And the cycle continues on into American Business apathy and mediocrity. Oh and did I fail to mention that the training process becomes more intense and overwhelming to each new hire? One story tells of a company that made the training program so complex in an effort to increase the “quality” of employees (you know because we don’t trust trainers – the very people we have doing the training), the program grew from 1 week to 6 -7 weeks before they could work on their own. Couple that with the increasing  turnover rate and you have one grade A disaster. That’s also how you increase your percentage of people who take one look at the job and decide to bail. Of course, that doesn't mean anything should change, right?

2.  Hiring from outside increases the quality of employees and management

Now, there are some industries where hiring from an outside department makes sense. The job of the supervisor can often demand a skill set different than the employees he manages. Also, people don’t always react well to their peers being promoted ahead of them. Of course, if its clear in advance by clear and discernible standards there shouldn’t be an issue, but I digress. For most companies and organizations at all, this has to be one of the most crippling things they can do. Not on the management level mind you, but on the employee level. Why? Think about it. Most companies that are small have to hire from within because no glittering resumed managers or directors want to work for your nickel-and-dime operation. Small companies are, however, known to have hard working and robust employee bases that are very concerned about the company, especially when it begins to grow.

They feel a close connection with the owner or executive (probably because he’s working in the store with them) and see their performance as a chance to be considered for more responsibilities and management when it arises.

But as a company grows it begins to realize that “holy crap, people want to work for us!” All of a sudden that glossy resume for a management position that comes in looks real tempting and sure enough, if he’s quality he’ll get right to work making the right moves just as soon as he gets adjusted into the new role…maybe. Because he hasn’t worked for your company before he might be a total flop, but he had a nice resume, right? If it goes right, he in turn will teach everyone else to be just as awesome and since we all know that great performance on the ground level is determined by the quality of its management, things are only going to go up.

The truth: every employee in the company who now works for that new guy and was working his butt off for a promotion just found out he hates his job and hates your company. In fact, the only people on the ground level (ie, the people actually doing the footwork) who aren’t negatively affected are the one’s who didn’t care about advancing before, ie, the one’s not trying. So you just pretty much alienated all your best people.

Worse, when you promote from within you prove to your people that “this is a place where you can work hard, prove yourself, and by getting results, can be rewarded and trusted with more responsibility.” As opposed to what you just did which was tell them that, “this is a place where you can work hard, prove yourself, and by getting results…get punished by having to take orders from someone who doesn’t know how to work this thing yet, for the same pay, no less.” How motivating.

What usually ends up happening is employee morale and culture on the ground level becomes very apathetic, detached, un-invested, and even anti-establishment. (And this is about the point where the Union moves in. Okay that's an extreme...when it doesn't devolve into that).

This in turn leads the executive branch to discipline more and have less faith in its employees, which leads to less promotions. Eventually, companies doing this end up hiring most of their management from outside and the ones they hire from within are usually young longshots (not disenfranchised yet) that need so much development they pretty much start out by screwing up everything and everyone which only proves to executives that is pays to hire from outside. We call this business model, the American Retail model, and it boast a turnover rate of over 80%! That’s right, in a single year most retailers will lose 80% of their employees, at least that was the stat in 2009. (It is 2013 now and I suppose almost 20% real unemployment has probably changed that a little, but not in a good way.) Why? How could they leave such a wonderful opportunity to work for decades making the same nothing wage for people who they never knew or cared about? I wonder.

The inevitable conclusion is a gap between managers and employees, which equates to a gap between those with ownership of their company and those without it. The greater the gap the more the employees don’t care anymore and the more Mr. Smith has to perform write ups and hand out pink slips, or just put up with mediocrity. Which is where most businesses land, while paying up the nose to maintain a very busy HR department. Happy hiring!

3.  Constant criticism ensures employees don’t “slack off” on the job because they know their being watched.

Most people have worked for a manager or executive who comes into their store or office and starts going over all their paperwork and files to makes sure they are “compliant”. Finding your every little mistake they then make a list of your “failures” and demand you fix them by their next visit. Leaving tons of peons to work extra-hard to appease the corporate gods before they demand a sacrifice!

At best the way executives see this is showing their underlings that “hey, I’m paying attention, so don’t screw up!” The pressure has to be on constantly or by human nature (which is always assumed to be the worst nature ever experienced) will be to let things slide. Most of them with the most positive attitude feel it is even a chance to go into the location and “help” them with your executive knowledge and leadership (since being behind a desk for the last few years has ensured that policies and procedures are about the only thing you can instruct people on and still not be thought of as a bumbling idiot who must have never worked this job.)

Now don’t get me wrong, you have to ensure policy is followed, but understand how your employees see you. What they see is some high paid oaf coming in to tell all the hard working peons they are failures and expect that to motivate them. Would it surpise you that this leads to many real world scenerios where even those employees performing in the top 1% of their company will receive a visit with entirely negative feedback complete with demands to know why they are a failure and how their can justify their job? You should, I’ve seen it. Regardless of performance this model comes across as somebody coming in to prove their awesomeness by having only negative things to say. Finding the most minute little procedure to tell everyone how they are failures and their performance is “unacceptable”.  Thus ensuring every staff member that their hard work and drive to excel went completely unnoticed and meant nothing compared to leaving grammatically perfect notes or properly filing paperwork.

How does this motivate people to perform? Answer: obviously it doesn’t. It motivates them to sacrifice performance to do paperwork right while looking for another job.

4.   Assuming executives and managers always know better than the employees and listening to them is admitting you don’t deserve your position

Every executive and manager needs to feel secure in their position. They need to know that they are there for a reason and people respect their authority. Interestingly, one of the ways this manifests itself is by telling the people on the ground level that their ideas are naïve and worthless. Or by telling them it is important but not practical for anything, as evidenced by the lack of change the suggestion made. One of the surefire ways to tell your employees they have no potential in the company and that you don’t care about their contribution is to not listen to their suggestions. It is also a way to shut out those nasty ideas that just might make things better. Heaven forbid the worker ants on the ground level ever feel they have a better place in the company!

In the workplace there are two types of people, Employees and Partners. Employees are there to earn a paycheck and leave. In the words of Dave Ramsy “an employee is someone who shows up late, leaves early, and steals while their there.” Enough said. Partners are people who are “invested” in the performance of the company. An employee who knows his suggestions are affecting change is deeply invested in the performance of the company. Why? Because if his idea fails, so do his chances of promotion or keeping his job!

Believe it or not, people who say “I have a great idea,” and are allowed to do it work extra hard to make it perform because their namesake is on the line. The opposite, telling them just to shut up and do what you ask, means their manager’s namesake is on the line. And who cares about that, especially when he doesn’t even care to listen to me…jerk.

Managers are often afraid their employees or lower managers will “screw” things up by doing something they want to do. And lets be honest, if the employee likes it and the manager doesn’t obviously the employee is wrong because the manager is the manager for a reason, right? Wrong. I learned this lesson way back. I had a string of seemingly dumb people that underperformed working under me who made these suggestions that I was uncomfortable with. My image of them seemed to not help. But oddly enough, a lot of those ideas were actually very good and improved things greatly. As a manager I was so caught up in, “this is the way I learned to do it and that’s good enough for you too,” that I didn’t even think someone could find a way to improve it. And if there’s something I’ve learned, ground level employees are often your frontline for finding ways to improve it. That might be because they just happen to be the people “actually interacting at the point of sale or production”. And in a constantly changing market, who do you think knows more about the changing nature of the transaction on the ground level, the guy actually performing the transaction or the guy looking at reports from his office chair? You figure it out. What’s awesome about this is that you find out pretty quick who really has potential and who does not. Great ideas will prove those who are innovative and invested, while equally showing those who are not.

5.    There are certain things employees need to hear to be more productive. Boss Talk.

We’ve all heard it. We tell the boss we can’t get all the reports he asked for tonight because he already asked us to do several other things and what does he say? It shouldn’t take you more than 5 minutes to finish those reports, you have plenty of time, you’re just not willing to do it.

Now the problem with this is that in this management model, the supervisor knows the employee can’t get all that done in the time he has, but because he wants him to get as much done as possible he tells him he expects him to do it all. The logic is simple. If we expect them to do absurd amounts of work, then in attempting to do so they will do more than if we had less expectations.

This model can get really bad, with bosses at best showing their employees their amazing ability to not understand reality and at worst outright lying to their employees. You must ask yourself, "how would I feel if I was told directly that I was the only one having the problem I was having and that everyone else had mastered it." Only to find out it was a blatant lie and it took no time at all to figure out that “everyone” had the same problem they just didn’t want you to think you had an excuse to fail.

That is where this logic begins. If we give employees an excuse to fail then obviously being the mind-numbed, overworked, apathetic, constantly criticized, underpaid, and un-heard peons we’ve made them they’ll slack off. We can’t have that! If we tell them this is a setback then heck, they’ll feel free to bottom out the next three months until we find a fix before even trying again because they know they can get away with it.

What executives and managers miss is that employees are smarter than your average honey obsessed bear looking for picnic baskets, they know that 90% of your “boss talk” is BS. They simply don’t want to tell you that because you’re their boss and if you decide the sky is pink then that’s how things are run and they can’t change that.

Sadly, the employees inclined to actually expect honesty in the workplace and question these things are the first ones handed a pink slip. How dare you question the pink sky! The truth is employees work harder for bosses who are honest with them and understand them. Telling them it’s easy to stock three pallets of glass bottles in 15 minutes is not going to make John Doe work harder. In the long run it’s going to tell him that everything you say is unintelligent and pointless and that your expectations are unachievable. That’s going to be a great set up for the next time you try to coach him on the importance of showing up to work on time.

Now all those meetings where you are expecting everyone to listen to you and respect the important stuff you have to say is full of people who could care less about how this time you’re probably going to tell them they should be eating lunch while writing their action plans and finishing their audit of 50 contracts in the 15 minutes you leave them before closing.

In the end, employees are inclined to disrespect you, foregoing honesty and integrity if you yourself cannot be honest or display integrity. I learned in my time that it’s amazing how responsible people are with understanding so long as you bring them in as partners working with you. I always admitted to my employees what challenges we faced. Yes we have to run diagnostics, write software, perform all our tedious paperwork, get moment to moment updates through work emails, perform audits, manage sales, inventory, and assist customer for the entire store from these two computers that break down every other day. But it’s what we have to work with. I’m in this with you buddy, help me get it done and lets find a way to get better at it every day, that’s all that I expect.

Without sounding my own trumpet, that actually turned out awesome, really awesome. Let me tell you, finishing #1 nationally is a good feeling…until someone comes in from headquarters and tells you you’re a failure. Eh, I guess its just business.

6. Executives are due certain privileges and can be held to a different standard.

I almost left this one out because I know that for as many seemingly pointless executives who earn big paychecks I know of there are those who work 14 hours a day, six or seven days a week who spend maybe a few hours a month with people they care about, if the demands of the company that requires that hasn't yet crushed their social life and/or family structure forever. It's a very demanding life for many executives and managers with so much required of them, and as such, for crying out loud they deserve to be able to take that pressure off in a big way. But its here because there are those executives or managers who consider that they have paid their dues and earned the right to reap lots of money and play by special rules none of their employees have to abide by.

And honestly, nothing motivates a company to work better than seeing the guy in charge leaving all the dirty work to the minions while he/she runs off and plays, then pops in from time to time to act important. Being an executive or manager means taking on more responsibility and as such, means you should be accountable for more, not less. In response, that individual should be compensated more for having more on the line and putting more effort in, but in no way does it mean they've paid their dues. The bag boy on the ground level is also paying his "dues". Possibly by getting demeaned and criticized for doing good work by a boss who never did his job, piling more work on him, acting like he's smarter that the guy doing the job for him at his own position. And in no way is the company considering rewarding him for paying his "dues". 

If everyone felt compensated for all the crap they deal with that rolls down from up top, there'd be a lot of compensating to do, and isn't a bad idea in a well run company that can manage it and turn it into a morale booster. But by the time you get to the point where you hire your management from outside, have a high turnover rate, have overpaid execs working 10 hours a week, have bosses screaming at high performers to motivate them, and are doing the same or more work with less people to meet new challenges; you might as well roll out the red carpet for the union and let them be concerned for the employees' benefit, because you certainly have shown you cannot. Not that either of those scenarios are ideal.