Working With People

Three things right upfront:

1. Most of my topics come from experiences. When I note a pattern, I tend to write about it.
2. I try to limit the topics to business subjects and avoid personal stuff.
3. We are all people and we work with people. And people have personal challenges that can’t help but affect their work.

I deal with owner/operators of closely held businesses. These aren’t businesses with no employees; they usually have at least a few and sometimes many employees. These also aren’t businesses that are so big that they are run by a team of professional managers. My clients are businesses with the owners actively involved in management and making decisions with their own money at stake. And the owner has employees who are ‘direct reports.’

When business owners or employees have personal challenges, those challenges affect what happens in the workplace. I remember going through my first divorce (a long, long time ago) and being told by one of the partners of the firm, “You can’t let it affect your work.” This partner had never been married, of course.

I guess it is just a coincidence, but I have noted a bunch of personal challenges amongst my clients recently. These include disputes between members of the ownership group, divorce, other marital strife and elder-care challenges.

We’re all people and these personal challenges are going to affect our workplace performance. If you have employees going through personal challenges, their job performance is going to suffer. You might want them to not let their personal problems affect their work but that’s not realistic.

I’m no counselor and certainly no expert in this area. I’m a financial expert and consultant but I’ve got enough experience to have learned some things that I hope will be helpful to others. Here’s my perspective.

You Can Change Behavior But You Can’t Change Personality

Psychologists say that our personalities are formed by age four. That seems right to me. I’ve found that you can change a person’s behavior but you can’t change their personality. To me that means that when you have an employee who needs to change something they are doing, you have to make a judgment about whether what you’re trying to change is part of their personality or is it a behavior. This is really difficult as where does one stop and the other begin? If you’re trying to change their personality, you’re not going to be successful.

This Too Will Pass

If an employee was a great employee last year and isn’t such a good employee this year, why is that? If it is due to distractions from a personal crisis, this will pass. If it is because their job has changed and it isn’t a good fit now or some other factor, you need to decide whether that factor is transient.

You Can’t Take It With You

As a business owner (or adviser), we need to look at what we hope to achieve through a business. Much of our self-image is tied into our businesses. Business can be fun and it’s a means of keeping score. Of course, a successful business provides financial security and material things. We especially want to provide financial security towards the end of our lives. Those are all nice but we’re not going to take the material things with us when we leave this Earth. So what’s really important to you? I’d suggest your relationships with family and friends. Yep, people. Take that into account when deciding what you want to achieve with your business.