As a manager, a leader and a company owner, people’s behaviour is endlessly interesting to me. You’d think that if someone is being paid well for a position, they’d be on their best behaviour, particularly in front of the person who signs the cheques.
Surprisingly, that isn’t always the case.
Easy steps to sink your job
- Bring your drama to work. Add extra accusations, and throw other people under the bus regularly.
- Stay unaware of the company’s situation. Whether you work for a small company or an international conglomerate, not knowing the overall condition of the business will get you into hot water eventually.
- Show up late, every time. People love dealing with someone who is consistently late.
- Ask the same question repeatedly. Ask, and ask again. It helps everyone develop their patience.
- Constantly ask for more. More money, more perks. Weekly, ideally. Sure to be a crowd-pleaser.
- Underperform quietly. Don’t send status updates, or send illegible ones. Missing goals regularly works well too.
- Toot your own horn every other sentence. Combine with the above for a particularly pleasing effect.
With a little effort, you can sink a job like a professional. And your reputation will follow you, because the world is small and people talk.
Now read it as the manager
That list is funny from one side and considerably less funny from the other, because most of those behaviours have a cause and the cause is frequently upstream of the person doing it.
Asking the same question repeatedly is item four, and it’s almost never a memory problem. It usually means the answer isn’t written down anywhere, or the person didn’t trust the first answer, or they’re checking because being wrong here has been expensive before. All three are things the business created.
Not knowing the company’s situation is item two, and employees generally know what they’ve been told. If nobody has explained how the business makes money, whether this was a good quarter, or what the plan is, then unawareness isn’t negligence. It’s the default.
Underperformance that shows up as vanishing — no status, no updates, work quietly not happening — is very often someone who is stuck and doesn’t feel able to say so. People who are out of their depth and afraid to admit it look identical to people who don’t care, right up until you ask.
Constantly asking for more sometimes means exactly what it looks like. It also sometimes means the person has no idea how pay decisions get made here, so asking repeatedly feels like the only available strategy.
None of that excuses the behaviour. Adults are responsible for how they conduct themselves, and some people genuinely are difficult. But if you’re seeing several items from that list across several people, it has stopped being a coincidence about who you hired.
The three that are just behaviour
To be fair to the original point, not everything on the list has a structural explanation.
Bringing drama and throwing colleagues under the bus is a choice. It damages everyone around the person doing it, and tolerating it is one of the fastest ways to lose your best people, because they will not stay in a room where that is permitted.
Chronic lateness, once addressed directly and clearly, is about respect rather than time management.
Relentless self-promotion paired with underdelivery is its own particular problem, and the mismatch is what makes it corrosive.
Those three want a direct conversation, promptly, rather than a structural fix.
Which is the useful test
When someone’s behaviour is a problem, ask which kind you’re looking at:
- Is this a capability or clarity problem? They can’t, they don’t know how, or nobody told them. Fixable, and mostly your job.
- Is this a conduct problem? They know, they can, they’ve chosen not to. Also fixable, but through a conversation rather than a process.
Getting this the wrong way round is expensive in both directions. Treat a clarity problem as a conduct problem and you damage someone who’d have improved with information. Treat a conduct problem as a clarity problem and you spend eighteen months writing better documentation for somebody who simply isn’t going to stop.
Life does have a habit of coming back around — which is as true for the manager who never had the conversation as it is for the employee who earned it.
