On to the next one. Expectations. You know, we don’t expect much from our employees these days.
Consequently, we don’t get much from our employees these days. Set high expectations. Our expectations are very low.
I have a friend who runs the shoe department at Nordstrom’s, and she said, Larry, the most difficult thing we do anymore when we hire people to work in the shoe department is just get them to show up. She said, I have been abused by hiring people to the point that if they even show up, I’m satisfied. I said, well, first of all, you’ve set your expectations way too low.
She told me a story about she hired somebody. He came to work first day, was real gung-ho, and at noon, she said, okay, now it’s time for you to take your lunch hour, and he didn’t come back. Three days later, he shows up for work like nothing ever happened, and he was surprised that he had been fired.
That’s how it is. It’s gotten to that point. He was surprised he’d been fired because he left at lunch, never came back.
He said, well, I didn’t think that’d be a problem. Oh, come on. Come on.
But you see, the problem is the expectation was set very, very low. He thought somewhere in his brain, as deranged as he might have been at the time, that that would be okay, and in some companies, that would be okay. My point is this.
Set very high expectations. Manage those expectations. When people don’t reach those expectations, stop, re-educate them so they can meet those expectations, and if they don’t meet those expectations again, then you fire them.
That’s right. You fire them. Now, I’m going to talk a lot about firing people on my leadership series, and that, again, is all part of this series, but for right now, just know, set high expectations, manage to them, and make sure that you enforce the consequences of not meeting expectations.
Next is this. People are thieves. I’ve already mentioned this.
People are thieves. That’s right. You’re a thief.
You know, a recent study said this. Ninety minutes a day. Ninety minutes a day is what most office workers spend on the internet on personal things.
Ninety minutes. How much do you spend? I recently did a walk around. I did a walk and talk when I was shooting a national news show in New York City, and I walked around a park interviewing people about work ethics, and I said, is it right or wrong to make copies on the company copier? Everybody said it was fine.
What’s wrong with that? How about making personal phone calls? They also, well, sure. What’s wrong with making personal phone calls at work? And what about, oh, if you just stuck a pen or a pencil in your pocket and took it home? Oh, it’s only a pen or a pencil. That’s what they said to me.
Larry, why are you so worried about this stuff? Let me tell you why. Because it’s stealing. Here’s the question you always ask yourself.
Is that what you were hired to do? And if you weren’t hired to do it, then it’s not the right thing to do. You were hired specifically to do a certain job, and anything outside of that means that’s not your job, and that’s not what you’re being paid to do, and that’s not what the company expected from you. So you shouldn’t be doing it.
You’re stealing if you do that. If you come in five minutes late, you stole that five minutes. Divide that by how much you get paid per hour, and you ought to have to write a check at the end of the day.
If you spend 90 minutes a day on the internet doing personal stuff, if you’re making phone calls, if you’re making copies using the company stuff, I’m sorry, that’s wrong. It’s wrong. And if nobody pointed that out to you, and you don’t understand that’s wrong on your own, I don’t even know what to say to you.
Come on. These are matters of integrity and honesty. So right now, communicate this to everybody, but communicate it to yourself.
Ask yourself every single day, is this activity that I’m involved in right at this moment, is this what I was hired to do? And if you say no, then you need to stop doing it and do something else. And you need to be doing what you were paid to do and hired to do. Anything else is stealing from your employer, and it’s wrong.
And in my opinion, you ought to be fired for it. Now, the problem is this in business. Again, I told you I got some notes here.
We have some misconceptions about business. I think we’ve sold people short. We’re telling people right now, and it’s become very, very popular, that you have to be passionate about what you do in order to be successful.
Now, that’s a stupid thing. I recently did a national talk show, and they said, Larry, talk to us about passion. And I said, passion is a total load.
I know that bothers some of you because you’re passionate. I know people who are passionate, and they are passionately incompetent. They are passionately stupid.
They’re caught up in doing the wrong things. They’re all excited. And then they said, but Larry, I love what I do for a living.
That’s become popular. As long as you love what you do for a living, you’ll never work a day in your life. Oh, come on, get real.
I don’t love what I do for a living. I’m good at what I do for a living. That’s the difference.
I did a speech not long ago, and a guy caught me later walking down the hall. He was the president of the company, and he said, Larry, you’re so lucky to have found your love and your passion. And I said, so what are you talking about? He said, in there when you were giving the speech to my group, I said, you were just so passionate about it.
And I said, now see, this is sad because there was not one thing about in there I was passionate about. You saw me doing my job, and I’m good at my job. You paid me to be good at my job.
Let me talk to you about what I’m passionate about. It’s sitting on my patio with my feet up with a cigar in one hand, a great scotch in the other hand, my bulldog sitting on my lap, my wife sitting next to me involved in great conversation, a little Merle Haggard playing in the background watching the sun go down. I can get passionate about that.
Everything else to me is just pretty much a job. The problem is we’re not used to seeing people be really good at what they do for a living, and we’ve confused excellence with passion. You see, that’s wrong.
I read a great book, and it had a profound line in it. It said, amateurs love their job. Professionals love their job enough to be excellent at it.
Let me say that again for you. Amateurs love their job. I run into people every single day who said they love their job.
Professionals love their job enough to get good at it, to become excellent at it. Passion carries you that far in terms of success. It’s hard work and excellence that carries you the rest of the way.
Hard work and excellence. And by the way, it takes both. Excellence alone won’t do you any good.
You’ve got to have more than excellence. Hard work alone won’t do you any good. If you work really hard and you’re lousy at what you do, you’re just going to end up tired at the end of the day.
You won’t be more successful. If you’re only excellent and you don’t work very hard, you’re never going to be very successful. Hard work plus excellence equals success.
Passion is that little bit of extra that might carry you through some hard times, but that alone is not enough to be successful. Then we got those idiots out there who say, you got to be happy every single day. Got to be happy.
I’m not into that whole happy. I’m really not. Give me a guy with a good negative attitude who knows how to get things done.
That’s the guy I want working for me. I don’t care whether he likes anybody he works with, whether he can be tolerated or not. If he gets the job done, that’s what I’m interested in.
Remember, I pay for results. I pay for the people who produce results, who get things done. See, the problem right now, we’re trying to tell people you got to be happy every single day.
Let me ask you this. Do you ever get a paycheck in your whole life that down to the memo section says you’re getting paid this time because you’re so darn happy? No, you don’t get paid to be happy. You get paid to do your job.
That’s what’s really important. In fact, about the last thing in the world I want is somebody else trying to happy me into happy. You know what I’m talking about.
Every company’s got one. Your company’s got one. Little Susie Sweetcheeks who comes running up to you going, is Mr. Grumpy having a bad day? Get out of my face.
I got work to do. You see, we’ve got work to get done. It doesn’t matter whether we’re happy doing it or not.
Those are bonuses. Passion is a bonus. Loving what you do for a living is a bonus.
Enjoying it all. That’s a bonus. Enthusiasm.
It’s a bonus. The problem is that we forgot it’s called work. I wrote a book called, It’s Called Work For A Reason.
It’s work. You got to at least be breaking a sweat mentally or physically or somewhere in your life to know that you’re getting the work done. I mean, it’s not called playtime.
It’s not called socializing time. It’s not called having a good time. It’s called work.
And we’ve got to remind people they were hired to work. Period. You were hired to work.
If you’re not willing to work, let me march you out the front door and go someplace where they’ll pay you not to work. I get paid to work. I get paid in direct proportion to how hard I work and how good I am at what I do.
When you hire me to come speak to your organization, you pay me to be good. You don’t pay me to love it. You don’t pay me to be passionate about it.
You don’t pay me to enjoy myself. You pay me to do what you paid me to do, which means work and work really hard and be great at it. I’m paid what I’m paid because I’m great at what I do.
That’s the same reason you’re paid. That’s the same reason you pay your employees. They got to be great at what they do.
And it’s your job to make sure they are. Next is this. Well, that’s kind of a rant, wasn’t it? The reality is about that whole love thing, you’re only going to love what you do for a living about that much of the time.
About 10%, I say. Really about 10%. I don’t like what I do for a living very much.
Now, I see a lot of you are confused and think this is what I do for a living. I stand on stages around the world. I do things like this right here about 10% of the time, maybe 100 hours a year.
I spend about 250 days a year on airplanes and hotels and backseated cabs trying to make my 100 hours happen. I love my 100 hours. I hate my 250 days.
The key is I love my 100 hours enough to be willing to put up with the 250 days. I guarantee you the same thing applies with you and in your business. You love what you do that much.
You got to spend most of the time putting up with the rest of it. The key is figuring out that that’s how it is, the reality. So you don’t get all caught up and say, you know, I don’t like my job very much.
I deal with people like that all the time. I don’t like my job very much. Who cares? You aren’t paid to like it.
You’re paid to do it. Hardcore approach? Yeah, we need a little more hardcore approach.