Any supervisor / manager is going to have a range of performers to deal with. The worst of the worst but, if we are lucky, the best of the best as well. Some performers are internally motivated and some are externally motivated. Folks with an internal locus of control are great if they are high performers, not so great if they are low performers. Research indicates that those with an internal locus of control tend to do better at work than those with an external locus of control (caveats, etc). The point is that workers are as wildly unique as people are and it’s important to realize that any manager will have both poor performers and great performers. How you manage them is directly related to your ability to reach the goals of the organization.
I’ve seen it alot, particularly in bureaucracies, and in my field of human service agencies where bureaucracy runs rampant. There is often a culture with entrenched staff of “job entitlement”. If you speak with these staff members you will quickly see that they have a sense that they have a “right” to their job. Much has been written about the foibles of management, little has been written about the tyranny of “entitled” staff. They are a group of people who are not accountable and they have lots of justification for it. They’ve been around “for years”. At one time, they may have even performed their job, but that time is long past.
Like a marriage that is grounded in co-dependence and ugly behavior, the supervisor of the entitled staff has long since resigned herself to the apathy that runs rampant in her department. Senior executives are too wound up in their own agenda to look into what is occurring at the line staff level. The next mistake is when the senior executive is making comments about what is wrong with “that department.” Any time a manager distances himself from his subordinates, s/he is making a perception mistake. Subordinates are only a mirror of the manager. Any department, no matter how far down the food chain they operate, reflects the attitudes and behavior of the CEO. There is no “that” department. There is no “those staff”, there is no “other” in management. When I hear that language in a management meeting, I know that the manager is distancing himself in order to avoid dealing with the poor performers.
When I see or hear a manager complaining about the performance of subordinates, I am immediately aware of their lack of insight into the real problem. Yet this is an attitude that encourages poor performance and the tyranny of the entitled. As the staff suffers through the indifference and distance of supervisors and executive staff, it is easy for line staff to justify low performance and so they do.
The price an organization pays is a huge one. This is why: the high performers will leave, they constitute the “revolving door” that HR complains about. When this is happening, then you know that the organization is completely upside down. The revolving door should be designed and utilized for poor performers only. An organization’s goal must always be to retain the high performers so that products get out the door in a high quality manner. When the “entitled” stay and there is a string of high performers rushing for the exit door, the organization needs to take note and look to the TOP. Consequences of ignoring the “tyranny of the entitled” are dire. In this lean and mean time, it is a mistake that cannot be made.
So if you work in a place like this, where the tyranny of low performance is killing off what is good and honest and bright: recall those quotes from the New York Times: “When 40 million people believe in a dumb idea, it’s still a dumb idea”, so if you are someone who believes in something honest and bright, stick to it “maybe your peers will get smart and drift your way.” And if you are a manager here, then you need to make changes before dire becomes done.
