the fiction of loyalty in business
Jason Alba’s got another winner with: YOU’RE FIRED! Will you do us a favor and sign this before you go?
The title kind of says it all, actually, but I did want to touch a bit about a throwaway line from his first paragraph, because I think it’s an important point that deserves more attention (and it’s something that has been an theme in my own career lately):
Employers talk about not getting loyalty from the workforce, but guess who created that environment (hint: it rhymes with m-plaw-r)? All of the ra-ra team spirit stuff is fun, but when you get terminated what happens to those hours of team-building warm fuzzies? Should they evaporate? I guess the employer misses that part sometimes, when they FIRE you, you will be upset, and perhaps even see them and their team building exercises as hypcrotical at best.
It’s the truth, people. Do not allow yourself to be guilted into some misguided sense of “loyalty” to the company when the truth is that the company will do whatever it has to do to advance its own business.
This might sound sort of bitter and cynical, but think about it: A company exists to provide a product or service, and to make money while doing so. A company has employees only because employees are needed to accomplish those twin goals. The company does not exist to feed your family or to help you achieve your personal and professional goals. Those are YOUR goals, not your company’s.
As a result, your relationship to your company (note I did not say “your boss” or “your team,” which is a separate issue) is a business transaction designed to maximize benefit to each party. The company purchases your work in order to meet its own goals, and you sell your work to it in order to meet your own goals. It is a business transaction, like any other.
Recognizing this simple truth allows you to stop seeing these things personally: Your company will not hesitate to terminate you if doing so will serve a business purpose, just like you would (or at least, should) not hesitate to leave a job if it is no longer serving YOUR goals. “Loyalty” between a company and its employees is fiction. Your employer does not owe you loyalty, and you do not owe any in return.
So getting back to Jason’s point, I am consistently shocked when executives complain about their turnover and that they can’t find loyal employees. Hey guys, your younger workers (like me) are the ones who watched our parents get downsized from job after job- we learned early on about employer loyalty. Do y’all remember when you outsourced your operations to India? How about when that corporate reorganization shuffled people around into jobs they hadn’t signed up for and never wanted? I’m not going to fault you for cost-cutting, but I WILL fault you for failing to anticipate the natural consequences of commoditizing your labor force. You’ve demonstrated that you can’t afford loyalty, so why be surprised when workers realize that they can’t afford it, either?
So what is there to do, then? You should update your resume at least quarterly- monthly if there are lots of organizational changes going on. You should be (as I have said many times) getting out there and building your network and contributing to it now, so that it will be robust and full of opportunity when you need it later. And most of all, you should remember that only you are in charge of meeting your goals, and you should be doing all you can to ensure that you can continue to meet them.
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