How often have you heard an old-school boss say (or at least think), “Hey, they should consider themselves lucky to have a job.”
Our next few blog posts will feature excerpts from Burl Stamp’s upcoming new book, Becoming a Better Boss, which is scheduled to be published early next year. This entry is from the chapter titled “The Better Boss Mindset.”
This mindset probably traces some of its roots all the way back to the Great Depression, when individuals did indeed feel lucky to have any job at all. I still remember spending time as a kid with my grandparents who spent a good part of their early working life during the Depression. That frightening, discouraging time influenced the way they thought about life and work until they died many decades later. It instilled in them the belief that steady work was the best work … and that you always cleaned your plate so as not to waste precious food that someone had produced, prepaid, and paid for.
While my grandfather was always exceptionally supportive of me, I’ll never forget what seemed at the time an uncharacteristic reaction to my decision to go back to graduate school to pursue my MBA. I had landed my first job a few years earlier at Research Medical Center in Kansas City in the middle of a severe recession. The unemployment rate when I graduated from college was over 10 percent.
While he didn’t tell me outright that I was making a bad decision, he came close. “It sure seems like you’re giving up a great job there at the hospital,” he remarked, overlooking the great upside benefits that I believed overshadowed the short-term risk.
Individuals like my grandfather would become the first generation of bosses after the Great Depression and carried with them the lessons – and the scars – of living through a time when almost 1 out 4 Americans were out of work. They felt lucky to have a job. And the people who worked for them should feel damn lucky, too.
So, what changed? When did many employees stop feeling lucky just to have a job?
Certainly, employee attitudes toward work didn’t change overnight nor for a single reason. But a significant pivot in corporate culture that took hold in the 1970s is, I believe, at the heart of the shift in employees’ underlying attitudes about work.
In a 2013 Washington Post article titled “Maximizing shareholder value: the goal that changed corporate America,” author Jin Lynn Yang lays out the case for how a major change in business strategy, culture and mindset played a role in how employees think about their employers. Yang writes:
“It used to be a given that the interests of corporations and communities … were closely aligned. But no more. Across the United States, as companies continue posting record profits, workers face high unemployment and stagnant wages.
“Driving this change is a deep-seated belief that took hold in corporate America a few decades ago and has come to define today’s economy – that a company’s primary purpose is to maximize shareholder value.
“The belief that shareholders come first is not codified by statute. Rather, it was introduced by a handful of free-market academics in the 1970s and then picked up by business leaders and the media until it became an oft-repeated mantra in the corporate world.”
Perhaps ironically, maximizing shareholder value was certainly the underlying foundation in most classes in that MBA program that my grandfather thought was foolish to pursue.
Among today’s managers, I don’t hear an outright they’re-lucky-to-have-a-job philosophy as often as I used to. But what I do hear frequently is the frustration that no one is loyal anymore. And they’re right. Their blind spot is that they are only thinking about their employees when they complain about disloyalty. In reality, companies aren’t loyal either.
A trail of major shifts in employment practices – including more layoffs, moving from defined benefit to defined contribution retirement plans, and the proliferation of non-compete agreements – all sent a strong, clear message to employees from their employers: we’re going to take of ourselves first. The rational response from a smart employee should come as no surprise: I better take care of myself first, too.
So, does the fact that a frontline leader’s company puts shareholder value first leave them with an impossible job related to staff engagement and retention? Not at all.
The good news is that the single factor that influences staff engagement most is the boss the employee reports to. What individuals want and need most in their work life is a boss who supports, recognizes, and encourages them. A boss who cares can easily overcome the perception of a company that doesn’t.
Given the realities of today’s labor market and employees’ perception that they need to take care of themselves first, a boss who believes and demonstrates every day that they are lucky to have great individuals working for them has a significant advantage over those leaders who don’t get it. And that translates into a work environment that’s better for everyone.