LAS VEGAS — “You don’t know what it’s like to work for you.”
Those words came from Toronto-based UnMarketing founder and speaker Scott Stratten, who discussed leadership and attracting, retaining and motivating employees at the NACS Show on Oct. 1 in Las Vegas.
In UnLeadership: Leading for Tomorrow, Today, Stratten addressed a common belief regarding the widespread labor woes today.
“I’ve heard ‘nobody wants to work anymore’,” he said. “Not true. They just don’t want to work for you.”
People are now realizing they don’t have to work for low pay with low morale, “and that’s an issue people don’t seem to grasp sometimes,” Stratten said. “Just because they’re younger doesn’t mean they should be treated [poorly].”
When an employee is hired, there is an inherent business agreement, he said. “ ‘You don’t have free reign over my life, no right to yell at me, to be abusive to me’—if we’re a team, we need to act like one,” Stratten said. “A leader’s job is to use their shield to push things out of the way so employees can do their jobs.”
Part of that job can include being expected to show initiative, but sometimes when a junior-level employee speaks up and does just this, “We tell them to shut up and stay in their lane,” he said.
Stratten told of working in a movie theater as a teen but always complaining, being lazy, and not getting along with his manager; however, after a patron yelled at him and the manager defended Stratten, telling the patron she had no right to yell at Stratten, his view of the manager changed.
After escorting the patron from the theater, the manager returned to the concession stand and asked Stratten if he was OK.
“Instead of firing me, she looks me in the eye and says, ‘I got your back’ and walked away,” he said. “It changed my brain. That’s the first time I had any manager stand up for me, because every single time I’d enforce policy, they’d ask for the manager, who would override me because ‘the customer is always right’.”
From then on in that job, Stratten’s attitude improved and he always arrived on time. A year later, when he was leaving the job, he spoke with the manager. “She said, ‘When you started here, I couldn’t stand you, but you turned into one of my best people.’ I told her it was because she had my back.”
Regarding the phrase “The customer is always right,” Stratten said that is actually not the correct wording. “The quote is, ‘The customer is always right in matters of taste,’ and customers don’t have the right to yell at your employees and be abusive.”
If managers don’t stand up for their team, there is no team but just a group of people.
“The only thing that makes a team is cohesion,” Stratten said. “You can’t have that if you talk about each other and don’t like each other.”
Anyone currently having hiring issues is a problem Stratten said he probably can figure out in 10 minutes. “It’s pay, it’s toxic workers,” he said. “I read that a toxic worker is 10 times more likely a reason someone would leave your company than pay, and pay is a huge issue right now.”
No one ever self identifies themselves as toxic, however. “Self-awareness is one of the keys of leadership,” he said. “A self-aware leader is a joy to work with because they know what they don’t know, and they let those who know do it.”
To improve one’s team at a struggling location, a leader should honestly ask their front-line workers:
- What should we stop doing?
- What should we continue doing?
- What should we start doing?
“If you’re brave enough to do this, it can change your company,” he said. “And anonymous is the best way to do it. If they are giving true answers, they are being honest and raw.”
Employers can have a competitive advantage today simply by treating people like humans, he said. “To be great at teams, to be great a leadership, you only have to do almost the minimum because everybody else sucks as it. People aren’t everything, they’re the only thing in this business.”