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Strangely, I find that the same thing goes on in corporations everyday. Mistreatment of employees is a subtle thing in this day and age of litigation. It now takes the form of sarcasm and ill-disguised digs that pass as humor between peers and direct reports alike. In my favorite Team Leadership book, Patrick Lencioni’s ‘5 Dysfunctions of a Team’, he tells the fictional story of an executive who is terminated despite her stellar performance, simply because of her negative attitude. As the CEO puts it to the shocked management team in making the announcement, “seeing me ignore her (the fired manager’s) attitude and how it affected all of you could have risked your success, so I let her go”. The price of ignoring what’s wrong is ironically also often ignored. Some examples of things that go wrong in companies are the following:
These can all be atrocities ignored by top management. But what is the cost? Well, first of all, it’s a loss of morale in the workplace. The symptoms of this beast are high absenteeism, lack of sustainable high performance or productivity, absolute lack of friendships or outside of work socializing, as well as a high amount of cooler gossip and malicious back stabbing. One company that I worked for had such low morale in the department that there was one specific individual work team that was continually discluded from being invited out to Friday lunches with the rest of the department. You can imagine the relationships in that department! Another consequence of ignoring things that go wrong is a loss of confidence in the leadership. For example, when there’s no accountability for taking every Friday afternoon off, employees who work faithfully from 9 to 5 begin to feel taken advantage of. Worse yet, when a mistake is covered up and blatantly ignored, there is no resolve to what caused it in the first place and teams often face the same issues over and over again. The gravest consequence of leaders ignoring what’s going wrong in their teams is the loss of employees, especially good ones who find it easy to be offered other jobs. When workers see their leaders choose to avoid confrontation with bad-attitude employees or employees who make mistakes, they feel disillusioned and mistreated. Then they leave. The estimated cost of replacing such an employee costs two and one-half times the person’s salary.[1] Do leaders who avoid things that are going wrong not know all this, you ask. In my experience, I often find that these managers belong to the same corporate culture where avoidance is a staple of the business. Alternately, they can be inexperienced new managers who are unsure about how to operate when faced with the difficult task of confrontation. If an e-zine could be a call to action for leaders and managers all over the corporate world to take a closer look at how they are affecting their work environment when they continue to ignore what’s wrong in their workplace and actually do something about correcting it, then please consider this to be that e-zine. With kindness as always, Chala [1] 45 Effective Ways for HIRING SMART!: How to Predict Winners and Losers in the Incredibly Expensive People-Reading Game ( Ten Speed Press: Berkeley / Toronto) © 1998 by Pierre Mornell Copyright © 2007 Chala Dincoy-Flajnik About the author: A certified business coach, Chala is the person you go to if you want to jump quickly to the next level of your business potential. She has been a brand manager at companies such as Pepsi, Pizza Hut ,Frito Lay, Diageo , and Playtex. In addition to her growing coaching practice, Chala currently manages the Stationery Category brands for Canada with BIC Inc. For more information on coaching and on Chala’s coaching practice, go to www.coachtactics.com
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