Every
Man for Himself
hen it comes to employment, at one time or another I have
filled every role from the lowly floor worker gutting fish at a trout
processing facility, to the President and CEO of small business. Yes, these
presidential roles were in companies I formed, but the responsibilities to the
Board of Directors and to your employees are still the same regardless of who
actually started what. Good employees are the heart of any good company. A good
employee shows integrity in their work and understands their role in the big
picture. Then, there are the others – the ones who have decided somewhere along
the line that the concept of teamwork only applies to everyone else.
As an entrepreneurial business owner, you need a different
breed of employee. Ones comfortable with run-of-the-mill big business many
times don’t have the right attitude to work in a start-up environment. You need
people who are aggressive and eager, sharp and willing to take a little bit of
a risk. The employee’s attitude and personality must fit the type of work in
order to get a good mesh. That’s Hiring 101. For the most part, I’ve picked my
employees fairly well from competent and productive General Managers through
sales, technical and on down. I remember in particular a couple of stellar
employees from my first business; Kirk and Garrett. They understood the concept
of ‘start-up’ company and were loyal, hard working and had a great work ethic.
My wife also stepped in many times and performed whatever
jobs she had to do in order to help make things work, from handling the
bookkeeping and billing for customer accounts to simply answering the phones.
She even kept me company on a few of those mountain top excursions to install
communications equipment. Granted, her interest in making the business
successful was a little more vested than the average employee. But I was still
privileged to have many good people work for me over the years.
It’s unavoidable that occasionally you hire someone thinking
that they have great potential only to have them later totally embarrass your
hiring skills by immediately becoming a total screw-up. You start the training by
having your orientations and meetings, and you show flowcharts explaining the
basics of the business and what the different employees’ roles are in it. You
make it a point to explain that a new company operates on borrowed time and
money and that the sales staff is the flagship that feeds the business and is
essential to the company’s growth and survival. For that reason, sales reps are
given extra incentives and awarded bonuses for bringing in the revenue. You
also emphasize that unnecessary spending is not an option until a decent
revenue flow will warrant those kinds of expenditures. That’s the boss’s call.
So I fly my new staff out of State to spend a day at an
orientation learning the specifics of a service program that was to be the main
focus of our business. What’s the first thing my office manager relates to me
when they get back but that a ‘certain’ employee had been all gung-ho right off
the plane to use the company credit card and go load up on steak dinners at a
high-end restaurant. Red flag. Later, this same employee shouts out in the
middle of a meeting that a scull-and-crossbones popped up on his laptop. It
disrupted everything. My tech took a look at his computer and found nothing to
indicate a virus or other devious program that would have caused this. He did
notify me of something else though that was potentially troubling and it was
later verified.
My other two regional sales reps were starting to bring in
clients. The ‘other’ sales rep was bringing in lots of supposed leads, but not
a single sale. Finally I asked one of the other reps to secretly follow up on
his leads and we discovered that only a fraction of the dozens listed had
actually been contacted. That was all I needed. In a company whose very
survival depends on every single employee doing their job, there’s no tolerance
for this kind of behavior. Two of my staff went to his residence when we knew
he would be there, handed him a final check that included a week’s severance,
and collected all company issued assets. When my tech searched his computer, we
discovered dozens of porn sites listed in the Internet history files. We also
compared a few of the times and dates listed which proved that at the time he
was supposed to be out doing his job for which he was being paid, he was at
home indulging his carnal interests and doing it using one of our company
computers no less. This guy was also married and of my same faith. It was
disturbing, and very disappointing.
To anchor any doubt of this employee’s lack of moral fiber
and integrity, he later tried to sue me for not paying him more when he was
fired. Of course, an officer of a company cannot be sued directly for matters
relating to general company policy unless there are extenuating circumstances.
There weren’t. He just wanted to be in the spotlight a little longer and try to
steal more of our company’s borrowed time and money.
This employee was a victim of his own diluted view of the
world and had no respect for himself or others. Then you have those who try to
use their own common sense to make decisions that are detrimental to the
company’s cash flow from which their own salary is drawn. It’s what I call the
epitome of intelligent stupidity.
In my first company, we had hired a sharp and attractive
female sales rep to handle our corporate business accounts. She was my GM’s
choice and came in with a successful sales history and good references. I
agreed that she was a good addition not only because of her resume, but because
at the time, I was handling that part of the business as well as everything
else. Although the company was doing well, I was struggling with the Board of
Directors to move forward on several issues including relocating to a new
office location. They were being obstinate (to use a mild adjective) and it was
hard for the staff not to pick up on my frustration. This new rep had been with
us for almost two weeks when I sat down with her and the GM to discuss her
progress. She reported that she had yet to make any sales. That was strange
considering her former sales history and the fact that our company had the only
service of it’s kind in the entire State. Even I had been selling around three
contracts a week. There was no reason why she shouldn’t have had at least a few
sales and a dozen contracts lined up by them.
She explained to me that many of her potential clients were
professional acquaintances from before she came to work for us. For that
reason, and because of a personal sense of concern about the company’s future,
she didn’t want to sell our services to them yet in case the company didn’t
make it. That way her personal credibility would remain untarnished. After the
explanation, I distinctly remember looking over at my GM. He had a subtle
expression of sincere embarrassment. It was apparent that his trust in her to
understand the concept of building the company had been misplaced.
Now, if you’re one of those people who sees nothing wrong
with this woman’s logic in reasoning, then unfortunately, you don’t ‘get it’
either. Any time a person in a team environment puts their own selfish
interests ahead of the needs of the entire team, everyone suffers. What this
woman perceived as logic in her own mind was, in fact, undermining the very
business of which she had agreed to be a part, and to professionally support.
Without sales there is no revenue. Without revenue there are no salaries. As
the President of this company, I was reimbursing myself only about half of what
I was paying some of the employees in an effort to help ensure that there was
enough to go around. Self-centered motivation has no place in team dynamics.
It’s like the forward of a basketball team deciding to stand on the sideline to
watch and see if the rest of the team is successful before he or she makes the
decision to play. As I recall, that was this employee’s last day working for
our company.
When you’re a business owner, the financial viability of the
company is absolutely your first priority. Nothing else takes higher
precedence. Now don’t get me wrong here, it isn’t the only important factor by
any means, but it is the overall defining factor by which the company
will either survive or die. The employees are the primary means by which to
evolve product and/or services into the revenue that keeps the company going.
When they agree to work for you, they also put their trust and faith in you as
their ‘superior’ and are depending on your skills as a leader to run the business
properly. Most of them know and understand that when the company succeeds, they
all succeed, and that success relates to a fairly earned wage allowing them to
support themselves and their families. A business owner can do nothing more
heinous than manage his business improperly and destroy the trust of employees
for which he is responsible. By the same token, any employee who cannot
understand this concept and fails to uphold their contractual commitment to
support the company is likely destined for unemployment. That’s called Firing
101.
A similar team concept is imperative to the success of
families. They can only succeed when each member understands the inescapable
truth that to survive and flourish as an individual, you must contribute and
sacrifice as a team. Almost every debilitating dysfunction found within a
family can be traced back to at least one member making the ideological
transition from the concept of team importance to self-importance.
Business is the lifeblood that flows through the economies
of the world allowing us to function as nations, governments and peoples.
Families embody the binding social infrastructure and integrity that is the
very working foundation of those businesses and governments. To understand the
concept of family is to understand the very underlying principles of ethics and
responsibility that allow us to progress in every facet of our endeavors. To
deny these fundamental principles is to risk losing everything that we aspire
to become.
- Ranse
Parker
Circle
of Doors
