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You're The Expert, You Fire Him, continued
On my first visit to the business I found out exactly what that meant.
The nature of Steve and Ellen’s industry created a need several times each year for the plant to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for a month to six weeks at a time, to meet the demands they faced in a very competitive industry.
I happened to be there during one of those times.
The son was supposed to be in charge of the factory floor and of one of the work shifts. Right in the middle of this busy time came a defining conflict for him, and for the business.
You see, he was also a baseball player. And his team was in their league’s championships. So on a day when he was supposed to be at the plant, running the line and managing a crew, he didn’t show up. He just didn’t show up.
The problem of entitlement expressed by Steve and Ellen’s son didn’t start with this event, but it certainly produced a blossom here.
My guess is that there were many smaller breaches of trust that occurred over time. These crises don’t typically start in high gear.
They build, a drip at a time until the outlandish becomes commonplace - something that others have learned to tolerate.
Oh, they may be angry and agitated, but because it has built slowly, in time and intensity, people absorb a great deal more than they ever would have swallowed all at once.
I talked to the grandfather, and to Steve and Ellen. They were all hard-working, hard-driving people. Real taskmasters, no doubt, and I was instantly glad that they weren’t punching my timecard or inspecting my work!
But they were taskmasters because they had to be in order to build their business over the previous thirty years from nothing to something that supported the entire family in good form.
After meeting with them, I talked with the son and his wife, meeting their two small children, in their house, which was owned by the company.
It was definitely a comfortable setup: his family lived for free, and he was paid very well. Far better, in fact, than he likely would have been paid by anyone else, considering his attitude, his education, his interest, and his skill level.
In the dog-training world it is said that, “You train what you reward.” The lesson applies even more powerfully in the world of human beings. In the paragraph above we can see how the family has rewarded this son’s behavior, in spite of the quality of his contribution.
They have given him everything for simply being his wonderful self – and then, the parents are amazed that the child feels entitled. However, the issue is more complex and subtle than giving him goodies in return for inferior commitment and/or inadequate performance.
Let me give you a simple rule of thumb: “What you tolerate, you validate,” regardless of how people try to camouflage that validation behind bluff and bluster. We may rant, rage, or try to make the other person feel guilty about their behavior.
We may punish them in other ways, such as by criticizing them on other criteria, withholding affection, or with some not so subtle “digs” at family events and getogethers.
However, in the final analysis, by tolerating such behavior, you are saying that it is acceptable. When you add the fact that there are business consequences as well as family consequences, you can quickly have a business that’s dysfunctional. To mention a few results from the entitlement conflict:
- Business production suffers.
- Organizational capability actually shrinks.
- Non-family members watch and become cynical about the seriousness of the business – i.e., they feel they’re working in “Payton Place” or in some bad TV family sit-com.
- Personal distress disrupts business communications and collaboration.
Make sure you tolerate what you want to validate, and reward the behaviors and attitudes you want to train.
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