Getting Employees to Look out Instead of up

So I was reading Heidi Thorne’s Promo with Purpose blog today

why-dopey-employees-waste-your-ad-dollars/

And I was intrigued.  I completely agree with the blog post, but my overly analytical ADD mind started to wonder, “what is a dopey employee, and why do they exist in the first place?”  And I think I may have an answer.

Being the self-appointed number one expert in the world on stupidity, I have discovered that judgments like “stupid” and “dopey” are usually expressions of vexation and frustration, not necessarily assessments of a person’s actual intellectual capability. 

What happens all too often with employees is not that they are stupid, but that they are focused “up.”  By “up,” I mean to say, that many employees are focused entirely upwards on their immediate supervisor or boss, and not “out” on the big picture of company strategy, goals, or customers. 

This actually makes perfect sense.  Let’s face it, if you took an SAT test, your primary focus was getting the highest score for yourself that you could, not on the big picture of educational philosophy in general, or on how standardized tests were affecting the gross national product.  Not your department.

When I was an orchestral musician, my focus was totally “up,” i.e., on my own survival.  I saw the personnel manager, i.e., the person who had hired me (and who had the power to fire me), as my sole customer.  The audience was a secondary or even tertiary concern, if I thought about them at all. 

This is not a one-sided deal.  When people get into positions of power, it is, of course, delicious; so they rarely do anything to dissuade the fabulous attention of these newfound underlings.

When I found myself in a position of power, and I was hiring and firing musicians for orchestral recordings, I knew all too well what the default mindset of the players was.  I knew that I had to be extremely proactive in convincing the players that I was not their customer.  It was not enough to just say it.  Every action I took had to display that intention, and sometimes I had to actually reprove people for treating me as their customer.  I would actually say to them sometimes, “I appreciate the effort, but I would rather you took the energy that you are expending right now on sucking up to me and put it into connecting to the audience.”  Sounds rude I know, but most people were actually thrilled to hear me say that. 

Starting from kindergarten, when we are so eager to gain favor by pleasing the teacher, right through college and any hierarchical organization, the default is to look up and not out.  If you want your “dopey” employees to do anything other than what they have been relentlessly trained to do, you have to take extremely affirmative action.  What is obviously right to you is often completely unfamiliar to them.

© Justin Locke