A family here has an Australian Cattle Dog. You know the breed–diligent hard-working energetic herders who must always “have a job.” Doggie lore says one cattle dog lived to be more than 29(!) years and spent 20 of them working.
Over the recent holiday the visitors included four cats and the CATtle dog quickly realized he now had his herd, and his job. Forget all you’ve heard about herding cats; it CAN be done. And when the herding was accomplished, the cattle dog would lie down on the periphery of the room where the visitors were kept, head on paws and eyes/ears alert, peacefully watching his herd. Doing his job!
The human members of this extended family quickly drew the contrast with an experience they had suffered only a few nights before at the local outlet of a major national restaurant chain. The details need not be related. It was one of those classic restaurant experiences we have all had and was caused, as they nearly always are, by an almost overwhelming dose of “not my job” on the part of the host, servers, busboys…everyone.
Poor leadership is almost always the root cause of the “not my job” syndrome. Several scenarios may be at work:
- There may have been some bad hires. But a bad hire is merely the evidence that a leader lost focus, became hurried, or was never trained well in hiring/interviewing techniques.
- A poorly-trained supervisor. Usually the training is not lacking in company procedures, but instead in giving the supervisor the understanding needed to lead a mix of employees with individual differences.
- A supervisor may have fallen into the trap of trying to please everyone. “How do you like me NOW?” is a management technique that never works and especially not when there is a near-peer relationship where the age and experience of leader and follower are similar.
- The leader may be inadvertently doing things that create a “we/they” relationship in which the leaders establish what seems to be a special position for themselves, and the followers are resentful.
- Front-line people have become discouraged because leaders fail to listen when the front-liners come up with good ideas. The flow of good ideas will stop and “not my job” will take its place.
- Leaders may never have learned effective ways to manage meetings of their teams. A lousy team meeting is like locking everybody up in a small room when one person has a terrible cold. Soon everyone has it. “Not my job” is the sneeze we see.
- Maybe there is one weak supervisor in the group of leaders and employees resent the comparatively poor performance of the weak person’s people. Failing to deal with a weak supervisor will create a “not my job” outlook in the larger work force.
- Employees could be rebelling against a manager who is a bully, jerk, and bad actor. The employees may not be able to quit, but they easily adopt “not my job” as a work habit.
These are not the only reasons that cause “not my job” to prevail in a workplace; we teach about several others as well in our leadership programs. But, whatever the governing reasons, they all work through the channel of the employee’s attitude. For our cattle dog there’s a solution in his genes and it’s much harder for his leader to mess him up. Not so with the humans.