Who comes to work wanting to do a bad job?

It never ceases to amaze me the things that CEO’s resort to when faced with problems that don’t seem to go away. After all how many CEO’s who are prepared to stand up and say since the buck stops with me, I therefore am the problem.

One of the excuses that I hear and hear quite often too is, we are in this situation because of our people. We don’t have the best team, we don’t have the best people, they are not as productive as they need to be etc. I am sure you have heard the same too.

The pushback I give is, if the people are really so bad, who was the person who went out and hired them? You mean there is a company policy that says please go hire bad people? …. By this time I start to see CEO’s fidgeting.

Of course you didn’t hire bad people. Of course your hiring policy says hire good people. So what happened? Well, things in the company, like leadership and culture is what make otherwise decent people who are prepared to work hard for an honest living, start to take short cuts.

Seriously, to date, how many people do you know who wake up in the morning saying “I’m ready to go do a bad day’s job?” I’ll bet you, none. In fact when you hear groups of employees talking, they are always talking about how it is other people who are messing up and that they themselves are doing the right things.

So what we see here is a disconnect between how people perceive themselves and how others perceive them. And if you can close this disconnect and really align peoples self image with reality you will quickly find that those bad people are really good people and are capable of good work.

Throughout history, management hasn’t had the best track record in the world for brining out the best in people, after all, management are people too. If we can change the way we perceive our people, we will immediately change the way we interact with them, and they will feel this change and respond accordingly.

As much as books talk up about getting the best people, it is a fallacy. If performance is normally distributed, and the whole working population is plotted into this curves, there will never be enough best people to go around.

The real challenge is to get ordinary people to do extraordinary things. And to do that you have to give them, the respect they deserve as a person, and a say in their future. Miracles are all borne out of hope!