Get Rid of the Employee You Can't Count On

Don’t reward mediocrity.  You’d think that would be a no-brainer.  But, think again. Many larger companies and, especially, government, non-profits and public service organizations have unwritten policies protecting managers and employees who can’t be trusted to handle important, necessary tasks.  Small companies usually do a better job of avoiding this trap because they simply can’t afford to keep deadwood around.

To read the rest of this article from the East Bay Business Journal, see: Get rid of the employee you can’t count on http://www.bizjournals.com/eastbay/stories/2007/08/20/smallb5.html

I’m suggesting that you get rid of employees you can’t count on.  Or maybe I should say, get rid of employees you can count on:

• To deliver poor performance and low productivity – the mediocre, lazy slackers and bottom feeders.  For example, when critical projects are due, they often take unscheduled leave or won’t come early or stay a minute extra.  They produce sloppy, half-finished work.  They assume other people will be responsible for cleaning up their messes.  They do just enough that they’re not fired.  But they’re incompetent enough that you can’t give them projects that matter or are hard.  You’ll look bad when they fail.
• To have poor attitudes and mediocre behavior, at best.  They whine, complain, gossip, have low morale, create emotional drama, pursue personal agendas and fight over turf.  They’re negative, cranky, narcissistic, sneaky, manipulative, abusive control-freaks, meeting saboteurs and energy vampires. You’ve tried everything you can think of to please them – begging, bribery, appeasement, forgiveness, mediation – but nothing has motivated them.

Instead, reward and keep the solid workers as well as the shooting stars.  They work extra, partner to meet difficult deadlines and push to get things right.  Their personal and family time suffers because they’re dedicated but overloaded.  You’ll give them the tough projects with tight deadlines because you know they’ll do whatever it takes to succeed.  Everyone on their team and in other departments the team interacts with knows who can be counted on when the going gets tough.

In order to develop a company culture that can succeed, people who can’t be counted on can’t stay.  Be honest with yourself, and evaluate honestly and explicitly.  Be resolute.  Stop bullies; stop their bullying you.

As a manager, you must respond to the early warning signs that you don’t trust people and can’t give them assignments that count.  Find another place for them.

As a co-worker carrying someone else’s burden, make waves and polish your resume.  Don’t stay in a culture that rewards mediocrity and toxic behavior just the same as superior performance.  Barely good enough isn’t good enough for long-term company success and job security.

As a director or owner, don’t accept people who barely skate by.  Remove managers who are political animals and wimps, who’ll become just-good-enough, long-term managers and who’ll perpetuate a culture of mediocrity until the organization slowly sinks.

High standards protect everyone from unprofessional behavior.  You can learn to eliminate the high cost of low attitudes, behavior and performance.

All tactics are situational.  Expert coaching and consulting can help you create and implement a plan that fits you and your organization.

Guilt: Bad, Good; Unhealthy, Healthy; Useless, Effective

When is guilt bad; when is guilt good?  When is it a normal, healthy emotion and when is it harmful?  Most people try to answer these questions the wrong way.  And they forgot to consider how bullies try to use our guilt to harass and abuse us.  Most people analyze whether the guilt we feel in a particular situation is right, is what we should feel because we’re behaving or behaved badly, is normal because the average person should or would feel guilty for acting the same way. But let’s stand the approach on its head.

Let’s not judge the actions and situation by some external standards of right or wrong.  Instead, let’s look at guilt as if it’s a force for motivation, as if the purpose of guilt is to get us to do differently or better, as if we keep replaying the guilty feelings until we act to make things better, until we live up to our own standards.

When I think this way, the picture is much clearer.

• For most people, “bad, unhealthy, useless” guilt then becomes a major form of “self-bullying” that’s a waste of time.  We’re not proud of ourselves.  We run ourselves down, beat ourselves up, feel ashamed and harm ourselves.  Or we cover up the guilt, declare ourselves innocent and blame the other person.  We become righteous and indignant; it’s not our fault.  Or we wallow publicly in guilt, looking for sympathy.  But we don’t do better.  We keep repeating the actions we feel guilty about.  Wallowing in guilt, perfectionism and continued self-bullying increases stress and leads to loss of confidence, low self-esteem and depression.  And, eventually, we may even get a thrill from self flagellation.  We’ll resent people who take the fun out of our misery.
• “Good, healthy, effective” guilt leads us to do something productive.  We stop procrastinating, get over addictions, act better toward people, set boundaries we need, live up to our highest standards and make amends.  Some examples: we apologize for being nasty to our kids, spouse or partner and don’t do it again; we do the difficult chores at home or work that we’ve been avoiding; we give more generously to those in need; we pay our share; we return the stuff we’ve borrowed; we stop making sarcastic and catty remarks about our friends’ clothes, habits children and struggles to lose weight.  We know many specific situations in our own lives.
• What if people don’t feel guilt when they should?  Looking with this perspective, we can see them as not motivated to change and as being aboveboard at it.  I can trust that they don’t have the standards I do.  Good.  Now I know that I have to protect myself against them.  Many bullies act ashamed and contrite.  They promise to change and they bring candy, flowers and sweet words.  I look at the behavior.  If they don’t change, I wish them well in their therapy and rehabilitation, but I won’t go on that roller coaster ride with them.  The pain is too much.  From them, I have to protect the island my kids and I live on.  I vote them off our island, no matter what the relationship and their suffering, promises and claims that I owe them so much that I should allow them to abuse and brutalize me.
• How do bullies use our guilt?  Predators are always on the attack.  They try to get us to question the purity of our motives and past behavior.  Stealth bullies are especially effective at this.  Once we start questioning ourselves, our imperfections, self-doubt, negative self-talk, self-hatred and self-loathing will keep us stuck; weak and easy prey.  We won’t have the strength, courage and perseverance to stop them.  Before bullies would admit they need to change, they want us to waste our time trying to be perfect according to their standards.  For example, see the case studies of Carrie, Kathy and Ralph responding to guilt-tripping bullies in different situations in “How to Stop Bullies in Their Tracks.”
• Guilt is over-rated as a motivating force.  When we’re kids, we all try guilt to get us to do what we don’t want to.  Then we become afraid that if we stop whipping ourselves, we’ll become lazy, immoral and unfeeling slugs and failures.  But as adults, we can transition to motivation strategies that depend on the desire to do what’s good and right, and makes us joyful.

Joining our highest standards to our passion creates a different one of us, gives us a different motivating force and creates a different world for us.  Yes, that’s a big change.  But it’s a change we’ve hungered for.

How different our worlds would be if we stood up for ourselves, our families and what’s right because we are passionate in service to our best and strongest, not ashamed and guilty of what we did wrong?

Stop Internal Wars and Negative Self-Talk

Jane was stuck in an internal war.  Every time she made some progress toward goals she’d been pursuing for years – cleaned her house, did things on her to-do list, met people she’d wanted to, signed up for classes toward a better job, courageously risked being honest – she’d start beating herself up in ways she was familiar with since childhood. A part of her would say, in an old, familiar voice, “Who do you think you are, you’ll never succeed, you’ll fall back into being a failure, you’re fat and ugly, you’re not good enough to stay on track, you’re weak at your core, you’ll never do the right thing, you’ll fail like you always do, no one likes you, no one will love you, you’ll be alone all your life.”

Then she’d isolate herself and start picking on herself physically.  That’d only make things worse.  She’d feel ashamed and guilty.  “Maybe they’re right,” she’d think.  “I’m not good enough.  I’ll always be a mess.  I’ll never change.  I’ll never succeed.”

She’d become angry at her parents and all the people who’d taken advantage of her, at all the people who weren’t supportive now and finally at herself.  And the cycle would continue; a little success leading to self-loathing and predictions of failure, followed by anger at everyone in her past and present, followed by more anger and self-loathing.  After several wasted days, she’d get herself together to try once more, but the emotional and spiritual cost of each cycle was huge. Self-bullying – negative self-talk, an internal war between the side of you that fights to do better and the side that seems to despise you, that’s full of self-loathing and self-abuse – can go on a whole lifetime.  Of course, the effects can be devastating – anxiety and stress, discouragement and depression, loss of confidence and self-esteem, huge emotional swings that drive good people away and attract bullies and predators.

Perhaps the worst effect is a sense of desperation and panic, isolation and loneliness – it feels like this has been going on forever and doesn’t look like it will ever end; every failure feels like the end of the world; like there’s no light at the end of the tunnel.  You feel helpless and are sure that it’s hopeless.

Or maybe the worst effect is marrying someone who bullies you and stimulates your most negative self-talk.

This is not a war between the left and right sides of our brains.  This is usually not our being taken over by an evil spirit that needs exorcised psychologically.

This is usually a battle between two sides of us that split apart because of terrible, overwhelming pressure when we were kids.  Back then, we didn’t know how to cope with the horror so we split into two strategies that have been battling with childlike intensity and devotion ever since.

On the one hand, we fight to feel inspired and centered and to do our best; to be courageous and bold and fierce; to try hard, be joyous and hope for success.  On the other hand, we fight to make us docile and not try to rise above our meager lot in life, to accept what they tell us and give up struggling against them so they’ll let us survive, to motivate ourselves by whipping ourselves so we’ll make enough effort and do the right things, and maybe then they’ll give us something in return and we’ll have those feelings of peace and joy.

Both voices want us to survive and to feel centered, peaceful and filled with joy.  Each takes an opposite path to get there.  Instead of a psychological exorcism, we need an internal reconciliation and a release from old battles with our external oppressors and between our internal, battling voices.

The inner goal is clear: We’ll be whole and unified, both sides will be working together toward the same end (http://www.bulliesbegoneblog.com/2008/04/25/getting-over-parents-who-wound-their-children-the-2nd-stage-of-growing-up-and-leaving-home/#more-35): the different possibilities for action will be presented to us in the encouraging voices of coaches; we’ll be inspired and motivated by encouragement, not whipping: we’ll have an adult sense of our strength and capability; we’ll feel like we can cope successfully without tight control over everything and we’ll act in a timely manner; situations won’t put us into a panic; mistakes won’t be a portent of doom.

The path or process toward that goal varies with each individual.  It’s not easy; it’s not instantaneous.  There are steps forward and steps back.  Sometimes it will seem like we’re back at square one.  It requires great helpers and guides.  But, as we are able to step back more and more easily and look with adult eyes at the big picture, we’ll recover our poise and press on more easily. Have I ever seen these wars overcome?  Many times.

For example, Jane finally made internal peace.  Her warring sides accepted that they had the same outcome – making a good life for her, filling her with the joy she’d always wanted to feel.  They realized that neither side could defeat the other; their only hope was to work together using adult strategies of motivating her to take actions that would help her succeed.  They saw that her situation now, in middle age, was very different from when she was a helpless child and had to depend on parents who seemed to despise her character, personality and style.

In order to end the external war, she moved far away from her birth family and cut off contact.  She started a new life.  She knew she’d have to bear unbearable loneliness until she made friends and loves worth having.  It wasn’t easy but she did it.  You can too.

This unhappy employee created a hostile, bullying workplace

Doesn’t a good manager solicit and incorporate employee feedback?  Isn’t employee happiness a major factor in building morale and teamwork? Well, yes.  With most employees you’d think that’s true.  But listen to what happened to Claire’s team, which harbored an unhappy, negative employee, Heather.

Heather was a chronic, whining complainer.  Nothing was good enough for her.  She criticized and disparaged everything Claire did.  She looked down her nose at Claire.

The tea in the break room was never good enough for Heather.  The soda and snacks at trainings, the seating arrangements and even the carpet in the training room never pleased Heather.  When Claire did what Heather seemed to want, Heather found something else wrong or changed her mind.  Heather was unhappy and told everyone it was Claire’s fault.  No matter what Claire did, she could never please Heather.  Heather was relentlessly hostile and verbally abusive.

Heather was a manipulative bully.  She used her unhappiness, negativity, criticism and verbal abuse to get Claire to try to please her.  But what could Claire do?  Wasn’t she supposed to try to make Heather happy?  Wouldn’t Heather be a more productive worker and better team player if she was happy.

When Claire accepted the assumption that she should do everything to please Heather, Claire gave Heather control of the team.  A few people joined Heather’s clique and bad mouthed everything Claire and the rest of the team did.  The rest of the team slunk away and tried to ignore Heather, despite the hostile environment she created.

Heather’s unhappiness and constant complaining triggered a pattern in Claire that I call “Self-Bullying.”  Claire accepted Heather’s assumptions about who was the failure.  Claire mentally beat herself up for not being good enough to please Heather.  Her self-doubt increased and her confidence and self-esteem plummeted.

As hostility increased and morale fell in Claire’s team, productivity also fell.  Sick leave and turnover increased.

I was brought in as a consultant and coach to help Claire’s once productive team.  We quickly developed a practical supervision and performance improvement plan that Claire could use for Heather.  But Claire wouldn’t implement it until she had done some major inner work.

Claire had to change her ineffective beliefs that:

• Everyone will become happy and productive if you give them what they want.
• Managers like Claire should make employees happy.
• Employee satisfaction is the key to team success.

The key change for Claire was recognizing Heather as a bully.  Heather had learned to use her distain, unhappiness and criticism to get people to try to please her.  With this tactic, she dominated and controlled her environment.  But once Claire recognized Heather as stealth bully, Claire was freed from her own self-bullying.  She was motivated and empowered to use the practical performance improvement plan effectively and successfully.

Heather wouldn’t improve her attitude and her team behavior.  She soon left.  The whole team heaved a great sigh of relief.

Why had Heather been allowed to remain with the company after she had treated her former manager the same way?  I’ll give more details of how Claire was finally successful, in an article to appear in the Denver Business Journal on February 15, 2008.