All business owners are faced with company personnel issues and often, personal issues that each of us carries. Your employees, subcontractors, vendors and suppliers drag their invisible personal head luggage to your company. Sometimes their personal issues become your personnel issues. Business owners who are depending on other people to work, produce and represent the company are truly at the mercy of the people that the company decides to hire.

People who are looking for work can put on a good show in order to look as if they are the right choice. People will always try to put their best foot forward during the interview process. Nobody drags their head luggage into the job interview and announces their issues! They would never tell their future employer that they plan on: not following the rules; calling in sick regularly; not doing paperwork; balking at using a computer; using the company cell phone for personal phone calls; and parking the company truck at local watering holes on Friday and Saturday nights!

Assembling the design and build “A” team is a challenge. But getting the team to believe in the company culture and vision is the ultimate goal. People buy from people they know and trust. If your team members know and trust the company owner, then the team will be viewed as dependable and consistent. 

Think of your internal and external team members as if they were an Alaskan dog sled team. Your lead carpenter might be the lead dog while the production manager brings up the rear, picking up the pieces as the team makes its way from project to project. In a perfect world, each dog would pull his own weight. Together they would work as a team and victory would be theirs. But this is not a perfect world and people are far from perfect.

Take a moment to think about your dog sled team. Are some of the dogs pulling to the right while others are pulling to the left? Are there some dogs pulling extra weight because other dogs are sitting on their tails? Look closely. Are some dogs sleeping on the job and being dragged along? The other dogs know this, but they may be too afraid to tell the boss that the sleeping dogs need to be cut from the team.   

In Charles Dickens’ classic tale, A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is a prisoner of his own creation. His passion for work and money forge links of despair and doom removing all joy from his life. Where did Scrooge get his work ethic, his avarice and desire for more? Perhaps it was the way Ebenezer was raised as a child and what he came to value as an adult. Ultimately, Ebenezer sees the error of his ways, repents and vows to change his life. The tale closes with Dickens’ hope that all men can change if they see the light, but can we?

Ebenezer explores the past in order to better understand what is happening in his present and to prepare him for the future which he envisions. To change, we must first unlearn the unqualified messages that we heard from people who had good intentions but were not qualified in a specific field of expertise. Remember when you were a kid how you were told that it was crass or inappropriate to talk about money? And who can forget mother’s message about talking to strangers. Well, isn’t our contracting business driven by talking to strangers about how much money they have to accomplish their housing goals?!  

How many messages are rattling around in your brain of which you are unaware? How long have you been carrying them? The reality is that you cannot get rid of these messages because they have been recorded for life. The trick is to keep the good and helpful messages that we received as children from parents and adults and to control the volume on the counter-productive, destructive or unqualified messages. We must learn to live with them because we cannot erase them.

Often, we would like others to change, but why is it we resist change ourselves?  The amount of change we are willing to make will be in direct proportion to the reward we collect.