You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The 3 divisions of the modern American work place.
According to someone smarter and richer than me, there are 3 categories of workers in every organization.
The A group: Those who lead. Those who excel. Those who drive product forward and make people want to buy what ever it is your selling.
The B group: People who mostly do a good job. They don’t go out of their way to do any more than they have to. They collect a pay check and they know the handbook by heart. They care about their organization, but they are not inclined to take the reins and lead.
The C group. These are the anarchists, the doomsday squad antagonists. These misery loves company employees are detrimental to the bottom line. They would rather use company time to talk about how they are being screwed over, passed over, ignored, as opposed to just doing the job they were hired to do.
Group C is the equivalent of the trench coat mafia, hiding their emotions under an old west duster, perhaps contemplating unleashing their frustrations in a bloody barrage of “you hear me now?”
I was thinking about this work place pyramid today as the day turned into a stuffed blood sausage.
News is all ready a meat grinder. It takes your frayed nerves and slices them up with some paprika, tosses them in a skillet and then tells you to go to hell.
And when you let the mayhem get to you, it can get to you. Stress and work place indifference can affect not only your equilibrium, but possibly your health.
Recently a manager explained the different groups and the transition between them thusly:
It is management’s job to get the good workers in the B group to slide up to the A group. The idea is the B workers do a good job and they just need a push forward to be shown how to lead or take that next corporate step.
The same holds true for the randoms in the C group who are discontent. If management can get them to alter their work place thoughts and adopt a B group mentality, then productivity and the corporate bottom line will increase.
The paradigm calls for C group workers who are ticking time bombs and constantly trying to go postal, to be separated from the heard.
The C group is primordial ooze. The C group is bony fish crawling out of the swamp, inhaling oxygen for the first time, pushing off fins that have never known gravity.
This group must survive or die.
Under the principles of Darwinian selection, C workers will either be assimilated or they will be chopped off at the knees by Henry Ford’s assembly line of productivity.
I walked through my work place today and the conversations I heard were disjointed, disorienting, like being banged in the head by a member of the Chicago Bears.
I listened to partial conversations and it was a peanut butter and cayenne pepper sandwich of every which way but loose.
I saw B groupers tallking to C groupers.
There was snarkiness and nastiness and flat-out angered contempt.
I sensed anarchy and reluctance and a feeling of despair.
I wondered who was sliding up the pyramid and who was sliding down.
If this was 1775 Boston, the King’s sheriff would sense trouble, see the convening of angst and order the groups to cease talking.
“Heresy will not be tolerated under the king’s rule,” the sheriff would shout.
The group of heretics would disband, but the feeling of anarchy doesn’t just disperse because you are told to stop talking.
If I can see it, can’t the managers?, many of whom exhibit tendencies of the three groups.
Like the King’s sheriff, what can they do?
“You B groupers get with your kind. You C groupers, stand by the showers and prepare to be cleansed in a sacrificial and very public blood-letting.”
That would get their attention, I think.
Radical action has failed innumerable times before.
To operate smoothly, the machine needs oil. The oil is A and B workers pushing the locomotive down the tracks to the next destination. They aren’t always in step with one another, but they have a common goal of moderate to exceptional success.
To the C group, trying to crack back block on the punt return, please just shut up or get out-of-the-way. Don’t bitch so much and please keep your firearms in the parking lot.
As an old friend of mine reminds me.
“Do you have bills to pay?”
Yes.
“Well then shut your mouth and do your job.”
That should be put at the top of the pyramid.
Take that Darwin!
Life’s Crazy™