Are people giving you only a fraction of what they are capable of? Do they go home early? Yawn in meetings? Seem disheartened?
Here are the top 5 reasons people don’t want to work for you:
1) You are unclear on what you want, so it’s impossible for anyone to be successful. You subconsciously believe that people should be mind readers. The corollary to this is you keep changing your mind or changing direction, or find it difficult to progress projects forward. This is exhausting for a team, as there is no real progress or accomplishment to point to.
2) You focus on the negative, so people feel beaten down. If there are 99 good things and 1 bad, you’ll make sure to mention the bad one. Praise is faint, criticism is throbbing. You focus on details and lose the big picture. This shuts down creativity and risk taking.
3) You don’t care about people as individuals: they are just a means to an end, a way to get the job done. When the job is done, they are disposable to you. Or even worse, you only care about making yourself look good, or feeling good- and when that’s no longer possible or necessary- you take the light of your attention elsewhere. Noone goes the extra mile if they don’t feel seen and appreciated.
4) You are a workaholic, and expect the people around you to be the same way. Just because you didn’t get the love you needed just for being you, doesn’t mean it’s right. Especially if you expect them to work for YOUR EQUITY and not their own! More long term thinking about what’s right for the people on the team wins the day.
5) You have created no connection between daily activity and a higher purpose or mission. When questions like “Why are we here, doing this work, anyway?” or “What’s it for, this trade of my life energy for this work?” arise, you have no good answer, other than something to the effect of “It’s your job.” Without meaning, you have to fork over a LOT of money to bring in good people. Having a shared mission reduces your costs significantly- and accelerates accomplishment.
You want people to work for you, joyfully, willingly, overtime, with their full hearts and brains?
Then create meaning: make sure what you are doing in the world is something important, something that gives the work meaning; love people: see them as individuals with a full spectrum of needs and infinite capacity, help them grow, lift them up. And be a good communicator: be clear, be honest, be direct, be positive.
Even if the job market wasn’t so tight, people would be flocking to your door.
Read the corollary post: Why Noone Wants to Hire You
