"Nothing To See Here" The Problem With Being In Charge

Have you ever worked a job where it seemed like the whole system was set up to make your life difficult? I think we’ve all been there at some point in our lives. One of the hardest things about effecting change is that the decision-makers often don’t realize it’s needed. Most decent size employers conduct some sort of Employee Survey at the end of each year, but how many times has this really led to changes for the better?

Put yourself in the position of an executive. Let’s give you the benefit of the doubt and say you truly care about your employees and are yourself a conscientious leader. The reports that come across your desk say sales quotas are being met within an acceptable margin. Turnover in your channel is currently down and money is being made. You make at least $100,000 a year. You own your own home and drive a nice, new car. You don’t worry about being able to pay the next month’s bills. Not to mention that you are eager and excited to go to work each morning. You don’t ever deal with a customer or client directly unless it is a very large account. The bulk of your job entails approving and overseeing programs, sales, and other initiatives to keep the money flowing. What if someone came to you and asked “Do the managers at your business communicate well? Are they good to their employees?” How would you respond?

Now put yourself in the position of a ground-level employee or even an entry-level manager at that same company. Your job consists of providing goods and services directly to consumers or clients. If there is a problem, you are the first to hear about it and are also expected to fix it. If someone on another shift or in another position messed something up, it’s entirely possible that you get berated and yelled at over it by the customer, your manager, or both! You make between $16,000 and $35,000 per year. You are renting either an over-priced apartment or a home that is in some state of disrepair. If you are lucky enough to drive, you drive an old, beaten-up base model car with the check engine light on, or drive a slightly newer base model car with a big car payment due every month. If you don’t drive then you likely spend hours a day, with multiple stops and transfers each way, on a bus to take you to and from work which may be as close as a ten-minute drive if you had a car. Very often you have to decide between gas, groceries, or that $10 field trip your elementary school-aged child wants to go on with their class. That’s if you can afford any of them at all. To top it all off, you hate going to work! You feel like you aren’t listened to. You make pennies to get screamed at and deal with all the problems so that someone making dollars and not getting screamed at can tell you what you are doing wrong. What if someone came to you and asked “Do the managers at your business communicate well? Are they good to their employees?” How would you respond?

It’s easy for leaders of all types, stripes, and skillsets to think that everything is great. From where they are sitting, it probably looks that way. And it’s easy to look at leaders and poke holes in what they are doing. There is a lot of truth to the statement “The grass is always greener on the other side!” But sometimes their grass is greener because your side is having a drought. Most leaders and managers want their teams to be happy because they know that it will make the team better, more productive, and higher achieving. The first step is to learn how to speak the same language, to communicate in such a way that it makes everyone’s lives easier and their jobs better.

The problem with being in charge is that your view is limited, and you often don’t see the forest for the green. What can you do as an employee to help the person in charge see what is really there? And what can you do as the person in charge, to widen your view? Contact us at The Spectrum Perspective today and we will set your company up with a free, anonymous, web-based employee communication and satisfaction survey. We will make the results available to you immediately as they come in. Working together, we can see where the pain points for your team may lie, and tailor our signature program to fit your group’s specific needs.

A quote credited to Mahatma Gandhi reads: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Don’t let your world only be what you can see in front of you!