Commitment
I signed anniversary cards for employees today. As I worked through the pile, writing notes and thanking employees for their service, the word I kept coming to was commitment.
There was a card for a 21-year employee who started out as a service representative and moved up through the ranks to become a critically important department head. She is critically important because she never tells us what we might want to hear at the expense of what we need to hear.
There was a card for a 17-year employee who I have never known to miss a deadline. She rarely misses work either. There was another card for an employee who struggled just a couple of years ago and is now thriving in her niche.
I signed a card for an employee who was ready to take a job with another company seven or eight years ago. She had been through training and rose through the various levels in her department catching on quickly and always wanting more responsibility. We try to promote from within whenever possible and she had worked at our company for two or three years when she met with her supervisor about an outside job offer. She didn’t see room for advancement with us. All the spots she wanted were filled and she thought she needed to take a job elsewhere to really advance. The supervisor had called me on my cell phone asking for advice on what to tell her.
I offered that things change and she shouldn’t view the future without remembering that. I said that a good employee creates her own job and encouraged the supervisor to let her know we wanted her to stay and grow with us. She stayed and I got to thank her for that commitment today.
By contrast, I was talking to the president of a vendor we use about another vendor’s turmoil. Their president of the other had come in, screwed things up royally and been gone in less than three years.
“Those people are nomads,” the person I was talking to explained. “The company was backed by venture capital and that guy could talk a great game but had hopped around for years with little to show. They figured out his game and he is off to the next enterprise where he will last another three years. You would be surprised by how many people are like that. No commitment but they do quite well.”
I’ve always wondered how high turnover companies can operate. I am sure there is a system for doing so but I am happy to work with so many committed people.
