Scum Rises to the Top

If you live in the country or at least drive through it from time to time, you've probably noticed more than a few ponds that are covered in algae. This is caused by an imbalance in the ecosystem and/or a lack of water flow and drainage of the pond. What you can't see from a distance though is that this scum resides not just at the surface but exists well below the surface as well. Many businesses are like these kind of ponds. When there is scum at the top there is often scum farther down the corporate ladder as well.

A few years ago I had to deal with a boss that was sleazy and incompetent all at the same time. The only thing that he excelled at was trying to advance his own career and he did so by stepping on anyone that he perceived to be a threat to that. Under his year and a half reign of terror many employees complained to HR about him including myself. None of those employees got a favorable response from HR and most ended up quitting or being fired. This boss tried for most of that year and half to get me to quit or to contrive a reason to fire me. In the aftermath of all of this I came away with two conclusions: 1. The company has more money invested in managers than they do associates and will protect the managers as much as possible and 2. This guy was filling a certain quota for the company and they were never going to touch him.

It's always fascinated me how the completely unqualified end up in positions of power whether it be in business, religion, or political circles. Every four years the politicians and the media present us with two choices for president that nobody really wants but either one is really the only choice because the masses don't explore other options beyond what the television tells them to think about.

There are other kinds of ponds though. Those that aren't full of scum that have a healthy eco-system where the fish are happy and healthy. I want to be a happy fish. I don't currently work in a scum filled environment and neither was my most recent job either. But I've seen how quickly the eco-system of the job world can become imbalanced with idiots who rise to the top by sucking up to other idiots.

So today think of your life as a fish in a pond. Is your pond healthy in all aspects or is there a lot of scum at work, home, or church? What can you do to make the pond healthy again? Remember in a real pond the elements that make it unhealthy do need to be there, there just isn't the proper amount of them. Think about it.

Adapt to Thrive

I don't pretend to be an expert at managing others. In fact I don't even really enjoy it. I'd rather be responsible for managing my own productivity than be responsible for making sure others are being productive. But managing others has been where I'm at in my career for the past several years and until I find a means of working from home, then that is likely to continue.

When I was still a department manager a few years ago I had a top notch crew that could do most of what I did and delegating tasks to them based on the needs of the business wasn't an issue at all. But then some things changed that were beyond my control. One thing that changed was that the management above me stopped being concerned with holding anyone accountable for anything, including themselves. At the same time I experienced a good deal of turnover in my associates. So I had an inexperienced staff and upper management that didn't care to make them do any work when I wasn't there.

With productivity slipping and stress building I had to find a new way to approach my job. I found that new approach one day when I realized that if things were going to improve then I needed to be able to adapt. I stopped expecting my current staff to be able to handle everything that my previous staff could and started delegating according to their abilities.

I gave my staff most of the grunt work to do and left the more complex, and often less physically demanding, tasks for myself. A nice side effect of this was that my staff now needed very little supervision to do their jobs which also freed up more of my time to accomplish what I needed to. There was one eventual downside though and that was that I became so comfortable with this arrangement that I didn't really look for opportunities to train my staff to be able to take on more responsibility.

I had been able to adapt but only to the point of being comfortable. That can be a dangerous place to be in for any person in business. Beware of making yourself so comfortable that you forget to look for areas of opportunity for further adaptation to the needs of the business. In my case the consequences of this comfort didn't really affect me directly. They affected my replacement. I moved to a different department eventually and one of my associates was promoted into my former position. Upper management literally did nothing to train him how to do his job. I was more than willing to teach him anything he needed to know but I was so busy trying to learn my own job, for which I also received no training, that I wasn't able to help him out very much.

I guess what I'm really trying to say is that you should be able to be flexible enough to adapt when necessary but make sure that hidden within your adaptation isn't a layer of laziness.