How do you shape up lazy and incompetent employees?
If this is you, let me share a little story found in Stephen R. Covey’s masterful book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Powerful Lessons in Personal Change. The excerpt goes like this:
I was in a group once where someone asked, “How do you shape up lazy and incompetent employees?” One man responded, “Drop hand grenades!” Several others cheered that kind of macho management talk, that “shape up or ship out” supervision approach.
But another person in the group asked, “Who picks up the pieces?”
“No pieces.”
“Well, why don’t you do that to your customers?” the other man replied. “Just say, ‘Listen, if you’re not interested in buying, you can just ship out of this place.’”
He said, “You can’t do that to customers.”
“Well, how come you can do it to employees?”
“Because they are in your employ.”
“I see. Are your employees devoted to you? Do they work hard? How’s the turnover?
“Are you kidding? You can’t find good people these days. There’s too much turnover, absenteeism, moonlighting. People just don’t care anymore.”
If that story does not make sense, just know how amusing I find it when people and corporations investing millions of dollars in physical buildings, spending millions in infrastructure, then hundreds of thousands in advertising, only to turn around to hire people a scarcely a cent above the legal minimum.