I’ve heard employers complain about employees for most of my working life. They can’t find anybody dependable. Nobody wants to work. The new employee has a bad attitude, can’t handle the pressure, won’t take direction, or isn’t what the company thought they were getting. Sometimes they’re absolutely right. There are bad employees, and I’m not…
Holding somebody accountable for a standard I never made clear isn’t accountability. It’s me blaming them for something I assumed they knew. That’s an easy trap, because the longer you’ve been on the job, the more things start to feel obvious. I can look at a report and know what’s missing. I can hear about…
Most good employees don’t wake up one morning and decide they’re done trying. It usually happens a little at a time. They come to work wanting to do a good job, take responsibility for things that aren’t necessarily theirs, help coworkers who need it, and try to fix problems before those problems become somebody else’s…
Small-town accountability gets personal pretty fast. There’s a good chance I know the person I’m dealing with. I may know his parents, his kids, where he works, or what he ordered the last time I saw him at lunch. Sometimes I know everybody involved. That’s part of living and working in a small town, and…
Every leader says they don’t care about being liked, and most of them are lying, myself included. But when being liked and being trusted pull in different directions, trust is what I’m protecting. I want the people I work with to like me, and I want them to be comfortable walking into my office and…
There’s an old story about five monkeys placed in a cage as part of an experiment. In the middle of the cage, there was a ladder with bananas on the top rung. Every time a monkey tried to climb the ladder, they were all sprayed with icy water. Eventually, each time a monkey started to…