Who's Fault Is It When Our Employees Do Not Perform Well?

Improve Your Proper Leadership Learning

Control how you get all riled up.  A good leader does not expose how fired up they are about how mad they can become about a common issue.  Stay calm while standing in the middle of a test when things happen to go wrong.  If a leader does not like how a challenging issue surfaced, that is one thing.  To lose control of their emotions because of that challenging issue is altogether another thing.  Good leaders need to remain under control during the time when things are not going well.  A high level of control and respect comes in very handy when the leader is faced with having to 'lay the law' down.  An emotionally out of control leader who delivers a demand for improvement when things are not going well is not an effective leader.  Learn how to master this art.  It will help add value to your leadership style.  Employees perform better on a more consistent basis when they respect the leader who is appointed to guide their way.  Control how you get all riled up.  Who's fault is it when our employees do not perform well?

I was raised by a tough set of parents.  Often times my father would lash out and yell at us to get our attention on a subject he felt we needed to hear.  He had a way with his frustrations that used fear and intimidation to get done what he wanted to have done, in the way he preferred to see it done.  There usually was no mistake in how that process worked.  He was a very social and friendly person.  His social skills were top notch.  They would come alive when they were needed most to save his face when he just finished a bout of frustration.  Without those components in his personality traits he may never have been able to lead anyone to any type of good patterns of performance results.  His social skills were good enough to save the detrimental anger methods he used to lead lead his employees.  The damage his anger methods produced were often times saved by the good social skills he possessed.  However, long term he could not hold a good employee for more than one or two years.  The good ones usually moved on to more respectable grounds.  Good employees place respect a lot higher up on the requirement scale of personal needs.  Who's fault is it when our employees do not perform well?

Leaders who fail to maintain a consistent level of good respect for the work their employees perform are the leaders who will always be searching for better employees to do the jobs that need to be done.  Better employees have better skills.  They carry more understanding for the things that command higher respect.  As a result, they do not usually remain employed in an environment that does not perform or respect how they are personally treated.  When the work environment has a poor leader who does not respect the employees for what they provide those good employees will search to find somewhere else to perform what they know is good to produce.  Good employees go where the respect is the highest for what they do.  If you have surrounded yourself with employees who are not very good at what they do, maybe the good ones are not coming around where you are leading?  It may be time to evaluate which came first, the chicken or the egg.  Who's fault is it when our employees do not perform well?

I was taught how to 'control' my employees.  That was my up-bringing.  I learned how to perform that part of my business functions from my leader, my father.  In my early business career, he was the only leader I used as my template of study.  I did exactly the same kinds of similar things he would do.  The fruit does not fall very far from the tree.  My father was strictly a self-taught business owner.  He moved his way around the learning trail by hook or crook, modifying his actions by trial and error.  His education came strictly from the school of hard knocks.  Every single bloody nose was how he learned a new lesson to apply.  That is how my father managed his leadership skills.  That is how I learned to do the same things in the same ways.  I developed much of the same characteristics in my leadership traits that were passed on to me from the leader I had.  That is how most of us develop the styles of operations we honor and support.  We put out the very same things we took in.  We cannot put out Chinese language if we never put it in.  Good leadership techniques are not a natural thing that can be performed well.  They need to be taught.  Good leadership skills do not just magically appear.  As you might expect, my father would argue this point with me.

He would argue that my college education has hurt my leadership skills.  He has made that very same expression in the past.  He would also argue that my leadership skills were tainted by the ten years I attended a professional leadership organization for improved learning.  He would describe how those leadership lessons were filled with a bunch of loaded crap.  He has said that to me before.  He would also argue that having chosen a series of good business mentors has been the worst thing that I have ever done in my business career.  He has told me that their influence on my thinking has taken away my liberty and will.  He has said that kind of stuff to me in the past.  Now I share this kind of tough stuff with no disrespect for who my father was.  I loved him deeply.  He was my father.  He has since passed away.  My love and respect for him and what he accomplished in his life has actually increased.  He was a tough leader who had developed some very strong 'self-taught' ways about how he liked to treat his employees.  The truth is the truth.

My father was successful for forty years in his own business model and his 'self-taught' ways kept him afloat in the model he led.  However in contrast, during the past five years alone my leadership position has led many employees to produce more volume in that five years than my father ever produced in a lifetime.  I left his employment nearly 20 years ago.  I set out on my own.  I wanted to produce more than what was able to be produced in the environment I was raised to understand.  I believed that there was more to know about how good leadership could produce greater results.  I went to go find out if that was true.  Guess what?  It's true.

Leadership Work Is Hard Work To Improve

We love the people we love.  That does not change when we reach out to improve what we want to improve.  One of the most difficult things we learn about love and life is that we must eventually manage how we love who we love.  That kind of personal work should never interfere with our desire to improve how we do what we do.  Never get too caught up with how our loved ones try to distract who we want to become.  If we want to improve upon our leadership skills, never allow a loved one to distract how you desire to improve your plans.  It can sometimes become a nasty issue.  When one person in a marriage decides to lose some significant weight, the other partner may get tremendously jealous and subconsciously interfere with the processed effort.  Stuff like this happens a lot.  One persons desire to improve can easily set off another persons ire.  It is not a rare occurrence.  In fact, it is common.  Loved ones can easily feel threatened by a partners improvement efforts that they may not agree to join in and perform.  It happens all of the time.

My father did not believe he needed any leadership skill improvements.  He was solid on his grounds.  I disagreed and wanted to learn more about how to lead more people to higher levels of personal results.  We did not agree on the same set of desired methods.  My father felt threatened by the things I wanted to examine.  He knew he could not deliver what I was looking for.  He also knew I was not willing to accept how he believed it was supposed to be.  These are truly threatening things to personally manage.  They can become the fog that filters down how the path of success can be easily seen.  Many owners struggle with this kind of business effects.  They get bogged down with the fog they produce about the improvements they refuse to initiate and control.  As a result, many owners limit what their organizations can produce.  They begin to support how they protect that cap.  It is the kind of stuff that causes me to think about why so many good models do not perform better?  I continue to ask myself the question, who's fault is it when our employees do not perform well?  My father would consistently deliver this answer...it is their own fault.

Make sure you know how to improve where your weaknesses reside.  I doubt anyone can do that kind of effective work without some good source of motivation, desire and a friendly but effective alligator standing by.  We must first learn how to create the need for doing some work on personal improvements.  We must first learn how to want more success from the models we manage.  We must not become content with doing what we have always done.  Once the desire has raised its head, we must figure out how we plan to stay motivated long enough to go from one side of the plane to the other side of the plane.  The motivation we develop needs to endure a lot of frustrating things.  We must become better at managing our failures, trials and errors.  We must remain motivated when the chips of our efforts do not appear to be the right ones we originally desired.  We cannot allow our changing efforts to become detoured by some of our goofy thoughts we produce from the previous failure models we own by the wrong thinking we were raised originally to believe.  This will be our largest challenge.  Breaking the chain of wrong social heredity.  Breaking out of the wrong up-bringing molds.  These will become serious contenders in our path to improve.  That is why a burning desire is so important.  It will be needed when the chips do not fall very well.

Once we get the desire in place and the motivation secured we need to find a reliable alligator to keep us placed on the correct path to learn.  This is one of the main reasons why I like to suggest having a good business mentor.  We all need to have an alligator in place.  We need someone who can become our check and balance.  We will come to some tough crossroads that will tend to destroy how well we perform.  Those are the points of time when we will quietly quit the best work we do.  A good mentor can become a nice alligator that will bite us if we stop.  All of us needs an alligator.  No man is an island.  I have a couple of effective alligators operating in my business life.  I do not always like what they show me.  Those alligators are not my friends.  My friends will lie to me about what I need to do.  My business mentors will not.  I do not like those relationships but I do like what they produce.  In fact, one of those mentors is kind of an enemy of mine.  His rotten, challenging ways helps motivate my competitive spirit to move above where I would usually go.  He is not someone I permit to come to my house and hang out for fun.  These three things are important components to invite to become part of how you improve your leadership ways.

If you want to move more volume with more people in your business model, you will definitely need to improve the level of your leadership play.  I know.  I speak from a position of knowledge on this simple subject.  One will not happen without the other.  You may be able to bump up some nice increases in volume here and there, but you will not be able to sustain a steady and continued growth pattern in your business model without adding improvements to your leadership skills.  They will magically grow together, if you allow them to become one.  Who's fault is it when our employees do not perform well?  I now know the real answer to that simple question.  I must continue to improve me.  The rest of my business growth will follow.

Until next time...