The pessimist complains about the wind; The optimist expects it to change; The realist adjusts the sails

William George Ward

You Are Being Lied To

By Larry Winget

Larry’s Truths About Business:

Apathy is killing business. Employees don’t care whether they serve the customer well or even if they serve the customer at all. Managers don’t care enough to make sure employees are serving customers or doing their job. And customers don’t care enough to complain, because they are confident not much will change even when they do. Want things to change? Care. As a customer, care enough to complain. As a manager, care enough to make sure your employees are doing their job. As an employee, care enough to serve the customer well and do your job.

Attitude doesn’t matter. Motivational gurus have made trillions of dollars telling us that having a positive attitude is the key to success. Wrong! You can be positive all you want and still be positively wrong, and positively lazy! I don’t always have a great attitude. In fact, many times I have a really bad attitude. That makes me a real human being. Things go wrong and affect my attitude. Luckily, I am not paid to be positive. You aren’t paid for your great attitude either. You are paid to do your job. I’ll take Mr. Bad Attitude who gets the work done, and you can have Mr. Positive who believes that there are no problems, only opportunities, and gets nothing done. I’ll go with the person who knows a problem when he or she sees it, gets ticked off by it, and solves the problem!

Who cares if your employees are happy? I have employees and I don’t care whether they are happy or not. I don’t pay them to be happy. I pay them to do the job. Know what? They don’t care if I am happy, either. They just want me to do my job so they can get paid. It’s not about being happy. It’s about getting the job done. Besides, I learned a long time ago that I couldn’t make another person happy. I can’t be happy enough to make them happy. I can’t get mad enough or sad enough to make them happy. People are happy when they want to be and if they want to be. No other person has any impact on it.

You don’t have to love your job – but it helps. Too much has been said about loving your job. Even I used to fall into this trap. You don’t have to love your job to be good at it – but it helps. I don’t love what I do. Oh wait, you think speaking and writing is what I do? It isn’t. I spend only about 100 hours a year on stage. That’s two weeks’ work if you put it all together – barely enough to count. That stage time is the part of my business that I love, and it is the payoff for what I really do for a living. I travel for a living. I pack my stuff, go to the airport, put up with the security hassles, the abuse of attendants, delays and cancellations, lost luggage, wild cab rides, then check into a hotel where they can’t find my reservation so I can order up some room service that will be late and cold and wrong. Then I go on stage, love my hour I’m up there, and start over again. That is the reality of what I do for a living. In my spare time, I write a book or two and shoot a television show. I don’t love what I do most of the time. I put up with it because I love those hundred hours. And I’m not complaining – the hundred hours is worth the trouble or I wouldn’t do it.

The good news is that none of us are paid to love our jobs. You aren’t. You never got a check notated in the notes section, “Because he loves his job.” You got your check because you did your job, not because you loved your job. If you love your job, that is a bonus.

Not firing people is a cancer on your business. People don’t do their jobs. You see it every day. I know I do. I go into businesses where I have to beg people to answer a question or pay any attention to me. I have to break up conversations between workers in order to get them to take my order and my money. People take breaks twice as long as they are entitled to. They come in late. They call in sick when they aren’t. And they don’t get fired. Why? Why do we let people by with not doing their job? Fear. We are afraid. We spend so much time and money worrying about the rights of the employee that we forget about the rights of the business. If an employee isn’t doing his job– isn’t earning his money – isn’t doing what he is paid to do – he has no rights. Fire him.

Keeping a bad employee destroys your credibility with your other employees. Bad behavior then spreads like a cancer because there are no visible consequences. This is inexcusable because ultimately the person who suffers most is the person who should suffer least: the customer.

“But what if I fire him and he sues me?” You are right about this one. He might sue you. We have become a big sue-happy society. People sue for everything. Get a paper cut? Sue the dopes for unsafe working environment. Someone compliment your outfit? Sue for sexual harassment because, obviously, “Nice dress” really meant, “Let’s have sex.” So yes, you might get sued. Fire him anyway. Remember, it’s better to pay a really good attorney than a really bad employee.

Do the right thing no matter what. Ethics is a matter of black and white – not gray. It’s either right or wrong, good or bad, hello or goodbye; you are either in the way or on the way. How will you know whether something is the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do? If you have to ask, it’s the wrong thing. You always know the right thing; you only question when it is the wrong thing. So do the right thing. Even when it is unpopular or might cost you money or be embarrassing. Credibility counts! In the long run, consistently doing the right thing will pay off every time.

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Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you'll be able to see farther

J.P. Morgan, industrialist