Why are they here?

If you’ve ever worked for an organization with more than one person, you’ve had someone there complaining about how terrible working for the company is, what things are wrong and that nothing ever changes. You then find yourself, naively, giving that person an audience, probing more and finding some specific change to implement.

You feel good. You are about to do what no one has done before, and everyone is going to praise you for it.

You boldly stride into the office and announce the big change, waiting for the applause. But it never comes. Instead, your primary squawker promptly informs you it will never work. You meekly ask for people to simply try it. For a little while. Maybe.

They don’t. And your squawker now has yet another thing to complain about not changing. Of course, that person was the ringleader in sabotaging it. But that is beside the point.

Here is the sadly amusing part in all of it. That person is still working there.

Yes, for all the documentation, all the complaining, all the problems, in general managers tend to keep negative people employed. There can be any number of excuses, which I won’t offer here.

Only one thing matters. If you are not achieving your mission, whatever it may be, and those people continue to exist in your organization, then you only have yourself to blame for wallowing in mediocrity.

Take comfort in knowing that you are not the only one dealing with this. Wharton and McKinsey each wrote articles along a similar vein last Spring.

What needs to happen is clear. As the manager/president/owner of the organization, you must rid yourself of the negativity and place the organization in the best possible position to succeed. Whatever talent those individuals might have, their cruddy attitude destroys it.

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