Behaving badly?

I’ve been chatting with friends, former clients, and colleagues about the current situation in business and the attention being paid to all of the employees who are quitting their jobs.  Technically I suppose, I am part of the departure although my excuse is retirement. 

Truth be told, I could have continued working.  My best friend plans to work until he’s 75.  In my case though, if I stayed I would have been working just for the money – and money is no longer as precious to me as it once was:  

Time isn't money, after all - it's more personal and more important.  Once I asked a friend to help me with a project, and I added, “Of course, I'll pay you for your time.”  He smiled, “I'm afraid your money is a poor substitute for my time."  

Floyd Allen 

Even as a younger man I would not stay in a job where I was unhappy no matter how much money I was making.  Is that why so many people, seemingly so unhappy, are leaving their jobs today?  Is it so bad in the workplace?  

“Bad” is nothing new.  Our favorite Unknown Sage has been coaching us about bad for years; in many cases tongue in cheek: 

Universal Law 

Anything that begins well ends badly. Anything that begins badly ends worse. 

In my career, I switched out of a bad job on more than one occasion.  I attributed part of that to the nomadic nature of the technology sales profession.  In other circumstances I felt I was just in a bad situation.  And sometimes I simply failed. Other times… 

A common catalyst behind some of my bad situations was the attitudes and behaviors of my managers and company leaders (aka “company culture”).  Kim Scott wrote in her book Radical Candor © how bad behavior can actually lead to advancement: 

… people who behave badly begin to win, rising in the company.  When confronted with a powerful jerk, many people retreat to Manipulative Insincerity, more out of instinctive self-protectiveness than intentional wrongdoing.  In this kind of environment, there’s an incentive to retreat to Manipulative Insincerity in front of those who are more senior to them, and resort to Obnoxious Aggression with those who are less powerful.  The culture becomes toxic – many kissing up and kicking down, few willing to speak the truth to power.  This kind of behavior won’t kill a company right away.  Instead, it leads to a slow, painful death of innovation, and lives of quiet desperation.  

WOW!  That’s a lot to take in!  “Manipulative Insincerity”?  “Obnoxious Aggression”?  “Kissing up and kicking down”?  I must admit, it sounds familiar.  I certainly hope Kim is speaking to the exception vs. the rule.  

In his book, The Speed of Trust © , Stephen M.R. Covey offers a different observation about bad catalysts that can cause employees to quit: 

Low trust causes friction, whether it is caused by unethical behavior or by ethical but incompetent behavior (because even good intentions can never take the place of bad judgment). 

I agree, good intentions don’t count very much anymore.  I’m not sure they ever did.  

Well suffice it to say my fellow retirees and I are counting on the current companies, leaders and employees to figure things out.  Otherwise, we may have to go back to work.  And who knows?  Maybe it was our generation of workers that began those workplace habits of behaving badly to begin with, HaHa! 

                                                            GAP 

When life gets tough we could get a helmet… or… we could leverage the peace and share the power of a positive perspective.