I am excited. It’s football season again, well it’s preseason anyway, and I like watching pro football in the fall; mainly because it’s not baseball. That and every team starts the season with a clean slate and anyone could win it all. Each team is 0-0 and the future is wide open.  There’s hope that, this year, your favorite team could possibly get out of their own way and start winning games again.  Teams can shed their labels and begin anew.
I wish there was a season starter for employees each year. It’s hard when managers or executives stamp employees with over-generic labels (lazy, not bright enough, complainer, no future) which are hard to lose especially if they reach upper management. I heard it once described as people keeping their own internal, permanent filing cabinet on employees and when they hear that person’s name they just open the file and see what’s written. It’s doesn’t take much thought. It’s easy to fall in that trap of utilizing pre-programmed notions about people or situations. You just check their file: “Yep they’re a complainer, don’t listen to them.”

Why do managers tend to label and file away their people? Well, there are a lot of reasons and let’s be frank, some employees can make it easy to do. We’ll come back to that at another time. The reason I keep coming back to is that it’s easiest for managers to just stamp them and walk away. Oh, that and the fact that constantly evaluating and developing your employees takes work– hard work. I have worked with a number of managers that really don’t understand that an important part of their job is to develop their employees. From front line supervisors to CEOs they tend to want employees to come pre-developed and get frustrated when someone has flaws. Instead of trying to figure out how to help them fix the problem, they just stamp and walk away. Not fixable and not my problem.

I once had a supervisor come to me and ask for all new employees because the ones he had were, in his words, crap. True story. His staff was all recently new hires and he really had stamped them pretty quickly. I asked him what he had done to help develop them to which he admitted “not much.” He wanted them to just show up and be great. Knowing that he was a football fan, I pointed out that, at the end of a lousy football season, the first action team owners will take is to fire the coaches not the players. The owners gave the coach a team of talented players and tasked them with shaping them into a great team. The supervisor turned a bit white at my suggestion that maybe he could be a fault and needed to be replaced instead of his team. It was remarkable how quickly he was open and willing to start working with his players.

I would be willing to bet that more managers would take developing their employees more seriously if they knew they could lose their own job if their team didn’t do well. They would receive their own stamps: bad manager, poor communicator, lousy coach. Like the fans who can’t wait to see which coaches get fired, I’m sure employees would be waiting to see which managers didn’t make the cut. It sure would make the end of year assessment and compensation process more exciting and I bet a lot more employees would look forward to the start of the season each year.