Page 175 - Executive Warfare

The People You Have to Motivate

even like you. It is not in people’s nature
to like being told what to do. And you YOU CAN’T BE WITH
can’t be with a boss for a few years and A BOSS FOR A FEW
not resent some of the boss’s habits, so YEARS AND NOT
it’s a good bet that people resent yours. RESENT SOME OF
Even if they do like you, the relation- THE BOSS’S
ship you have with them generally falls HABITS, SO IT’S A
far short of friendship. I learned this les- GOOD BET THAT
son early. In my late twenties, I left a job PEOPLE RESENT
as head of corporate communications, YOURS.
where I had a department of 15 people.
I’d been there four years, and I thought
we were all friends. I thought they liked me.
After I left, most of them would not even return a phone call. The irony
was, I went back to that job a year and a half later. All the same people
were there. They’d thought,“The ogre is dead. He’s gone to New York, and
he’s not coming back.”Then the ogre reappeared, and you know, they were
quite nervous about not having kept in touch with me.
But who does keep in touch with their old bosses? I never did, either.
If you were truly friends, well, why wouldn’t you keep in touch? And the
higher you go, the less likely it is that you are going to be friends. The
stakes are simply too high.
So pay the people who work for you the respect of understanding why
they work hard. It’s not out of love for you. It is to feed their families and
to get ahead.
Did the people who worked for me enjoy having to show up first thing
in the morning for a meeting where I was ranting and raving about some
product development thing that didn’t happen, like Humphrey Bogart try-
ing to figure out who stole his strawberries in The Caine Mutiny?
Probably not. They put up with it for the same reason that cavemen
once went hunting barefoot in the snow. Not because they wanted to, but
because they had to.

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