Monthly Archives: June 2016

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4 Ways To Shred A Culture of Entitlement

“The quickest ways to kill entitlement are to regularly acknowledge what others have contributed to your current levels of success and always seek to increase this for others around you.” Andy Mason

 

What is a Culture of Entitlement?

A culture of entitlement means that your employees arrogantly believe that they deserve a certain level of unreasonable privileges. This belief is often built on the incorrect assumption that the current level of success of the organization is because of the work of the current generation of employees. Typically, nothing could be further from the truth. We are always building our organizations on the shoulders of the giants that have gone before us.

Where Does It Come From?

In the boom and bust world of the oil and gas business, a culture of entitlement always seems to take hold at the peak of the boom periods. This arrogance is created by the boom mentality where the price of oil increases and oil companies are scrambling to get more oil out of the ground by drilling new wells, creating new facilities and desperately trying to hire staff to make everything work. This desperation to hire results in escalating wages, options, perks and coddling that are simply not warranted and not sustainable.

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Givers and Takers: What Are You and Why It Matters

As a new feature of Thinking Business Blog, I am posting a brief summary of the business books that I am reading. This will be a very high level synopsis of the book and what I gained from it. I will publish these summaries as I complete the books and not on a predetermined schedule. I trust you will benefit from them.

The first book I reviewed was Procrastinate on Purpose.

The second review was Bill Browder’s book, Red Notice

The third review was Atul Gawande’s book The Checklist Manifesto

The fourth review was Brad Lomenick’s H3 Leadership

The fifth review was Eula Bliss’ On Immunity: An Inoculation

The sixth review is Give and Take by Adam Grant

Grant provides a detailed compilation of research in the area of giving and receiving. The results from this research, backed up by reams of data and an overwhelming number of examples is that there are three types of people; Givers, Takers and Matchers.

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Why An “Echo Chamber” Culture Will Destroy Your Business

If everyone in your business is always in agreement with you and no one challenges your decisions or ideas then you are running an “echo chamber” organization (this is also commonly referred to as a “Yes-Man” organization). This type of organization is called an echo chamber because everything the leader says, the organization echoes back to them. There are no original thoughts, dissenting ideas or challenging statements.

This is a very dangerous environment to operate in as a leader. If no one is there to challenge your ideas and direction, you will eventually lead your organization into one of your blind spots (news flash: each of us has blind spots) and over a cliff. You won’t have anyone to warn you until it is too late!

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6 Things I Learned From My Dad That Are Foundational to My Success

“One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters.” George Herbert

 

How often do we take for granted the foundational lessons that we were taught as kids not realizing that without those lessons we would not be the people we are today? I know I am guilty of this so, because this Sunday is Father’s Day, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about what I learned from my dad that contributed to my success so far in life.

I grew up on the outskirts of a small town in northern Alberta called Peace River. My parents were both from farming backgrounds and were comfortable with a very uncomplicated and frugal lifestyle. By the time I came onto the scene, my mom was a substitute school teacher and my dad was in the dairy business, neither of which were very lucrative. We never had running water until I was about 10 years old and we heated our house with a wood fireplace as much as we could (but the old furnace did kick in during those cold northern winters!) To say we were part of the lower income bracket is probably an understatement!

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What Are The 5 Most Dangerous Words In Business?

“That is not my problem.”

If anyone in your business responds to a coworker or to a customer with “that is not my problem…”, your business is in serious trouble! These five words signal a dangerous situation where that employee is totally disengaged from the business and does not care about it, their coworkers, the customer or their career with your company.

I have heard these words many times over the years and other variants like: