The S-Factor

What is your attitude about work? How do you view your family? What do you think of yourself? The above example about poor service through a restaurant’s drive-thru falls into this category of attitude. Some of the employees working inside have a, I don’t care attitude. They are completely content doing the bare minimum to get by. They don’t see a problem with a customer driving ten miles back to the restaurant to get his order corrected. In their way of thinking, correcting the order a second time is acceptable because the customer eventually got what he wanted.

What the employees don’t realize is that in reality they didn’t do their job correctly the first time, their attitude about it speaks of their character, and they will carry this attitude into other parts of their lives. Is this you?

As a manager, I have heard many employees say, “This job is just a stepping stone. I plan on doing something else.” Or “This isn’t my permanent job.” I didn’t realize there were so many people who could read into the future; that know ahead of time which job will be their final job as they ride off into the retirement sunset.

I also never realized that if you did know that a particular job was not your final job, somehow that gave you permission to work less then a pace of one hundred percent. How great it must be for the employers at the end of the line, knowing that they will be getting your all. That they gained something that all of your previous employers never had, you working at a one hundred percent level.

To make this whole process easier for you and employers, I think employers should run classified ads asking only for those employees who have chosen their company as a final job before retirement. That way, everyone is working where they want to be and working at a level of one hundred percent.

Are you starting to see the problem with this way of thinking? It is impossible for you to know which job will be your final career. Even if you are a relative working in a family business, will it still be there when you are ready to retire? Probably not if you are not giving one hundred percent. Here is a revelation. Do you like your company? Want to retire from that job? Give one hundred percent to ensure their success.

Do you see the correlation to marriage? People enter marriage thinking that if it doesn’t work out, they can always divorce. Therefore, they may not work as hard at solving problems as they would if divorce didn’t exist. Think about it. If divorce weren’t an option, then they wouldn’t throw the switch to the “off” position. When someone says, “I fell out of love” all he did was switch to “off.” If divorce weren’t on the table, then he would be forced to switch to “on” and continue working within the relationship. Like success on the job, if he wants his marriage to succeed, he has to give one hundred percent ...as does his partner. Are you working as hard as you could be at your marriage?