Eradicate This Creeping Danger In Your Organization

A quote which I stumbled upon recently from Natalie Dawson is: “We do not allow leeches into our environment that do not know what we stand for or what our business is about.”

There are leeches, there are time wasters out there, you could call these vampires. We all understand the concept of a leech. This is this disgusting organism as you go into these unclean waters that get stuck on you.

They are parasitic in nature and they just start consuming and consuming with no benefit that they provide at all to the organism.

That is absolutely critical to understand and recognize. In your business, if you are in charge of some aspect of your business, you have to be able to recognize the leeches in your business because they are pulling you back.

They are keeping you down. They are hindering your progress just by the pure fact of them consuming without any contribution. They consume from your successes.

This doesn’t have to be financially and it doesn’t have to be actual physical products. They consume time, they consume energy, they consume effort, they consume emotion, they consume intellectual power and just thought-processing brain power.

These can come in many different forms. They may be there in body, but they are not there in effort and attitude, in willingness to learn and in anything that is actually contributing to your business.

They are just a voice there. It could be an actual legitimate incompetence. People that just don’t know how to do the job. They are not capable of figuring out how to do the job that you have hired them for.

I’m not talking about that period of time where we are in training and we are learning the technical aspects of certain jobs and positions.

I’m making the leap that you are with me on this as far as what incompetence means, just the mental incapability to do the job right just by their nature.

Then the second would be lazy people. This is probably more common than any of the others. It doesn’t necessarily happen right off the bat.

It will happen over time and it will get more exasperating over time that people just become complacent and then eventually just lazy. They become entitled.

That might be an actual situation where they feel that they have earned the right to just sit back and be lazy even though you are paying them to do a job. Those become leeches on you.

At this point, it’s probably not worth whatever it is that you are paying them anymore. It could be easily disengagement. Before the full-on laziness stage comes disinterest, they have lost the drive and motivation to get involved and be engaged.

You have to be aware of these external factors that might be distracting them and be able to pick up on them. This goes into how you relate to your employees and how you are interacting with them.

You need to figure out if this is correctable. The worst case for leeches is legitimate outright thievery. People that are no-kidding criminals in your organization that could be flat-out stealing from you.

This happens every day all over the world. People steal people to varying degrees. Not always skimming cash off the top, but they steal in other ways.

I don’t get too much into that because that’s a matter for law and law enforcement, and that’s between you, your legal team and your local authorities to handle.

I’m talking more of, in-house, how do you recognize these types of leeches, whether it be time, competence, laziness, disengagement, etc.

When you have got this new employee potentially that comes in, they don’t know anything. They don’t know how all your inner office things work, the policies and procedures that you have and the way you do business.

You go through a period of teaching and training them to move them out of that total dependency stage into independent operators and in their ability to do the job without constant supervision.

Then you have to move into a phase to make sure that they keep performing without falling into some of those other areas that would then turn them back into leeches in that sense.

The best part about this whole process as the leader is you get to decide how much you are going to put up with, you get to decide what leeches you allow to happen or not.

In your business, leeches keep doing what they are doing because they are allowed to do what they are doing.

There are a number of reasons that we put up with that, especially as business owners and leaders.

A big one is they are longtime employees. They have moved into that lazy, disengaged phase, but maybe they were a great performer for you off the bat.

A customer absolutely can be a leech. This is a fine balance of how you deal with your customer relationships, and every business is different. Only you can decide what’s worth it or what’s not.

Then the biggest one, a lot of us deal with family as part of our business. We have this presumptive obligation to put up with family. You are obligated to put up with them and do everything you can to help them and be there for them.

When it comes to business sense, we might have the tendency to let the family dynamic overtake good common business sense of someone not contributing anymore to the success of the business.

Whether you like it or not, that’s something you just have to deal with. When you have things like core values and your mission statement that you can fall back on, it’s easier to remind these family members why you do things a certain way in your organization.

Please share with us if you ever had to deal with some leeches in your position. Were they a lost cause or were they able to recenter on target?

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