You Can’t Scare Workers Into Long Term High Performance
Written by Jerry Roberts. Follow me on Twitter.
Attitude, Communication, Leadership, Motivation

Woe is Bill. You see, he’s a manager who is stuck in the 1960s and who believes that you can get workers to perform at a high level if they’re fearful of losing their jobs.
Let’s examine that era for a few moments and try to figure what Bill is thinking about. First, it was a time when people still wanted to work for a single company for their entire career. You’d retire at 65 and your pension would be enough to take you through the final stage of life.
It was a different time
People who changed jobs frequently — as in more than once every five years — were looked at as flaky and unable to make a serious commitment. Getting fired once was scrutinized by potential new employers. Getting fired twice meant fewer job interviews. The rules were different then. Past employers didn’t fear lawsuits over telling anyone that you were a rotten employee and a worse person.
Employers checked resumes carefully. Any gap absolutely had to be explained.
Losing a job was a big deal. My mother told me, “If you get fired it will follow you the rest of your life.”
The masses bought into that and employers used it to squeeze them.
Bill saw his dad become a victim of that. For me, it was my mom.
Don’t get M.A.D.
While Bill has worked for several companies in his career as a hotel food and beverage manager, he still buys in to the 1960s employment scenario. He still thinks he can strongarm workers and scare them into performing up to expectations. Bill suffers from M.A.D. — Managerial Arrested Development.
Sure, he’s had plenty of training and is skilled at what he does. That said, his basic operating system hasn’t had an upgrade in over 40 years.
He invited me for lunch one day. I was to pick him up at his hotel and we’d go to a brand new restaurant that everyone was talking about. My 10:00 appointment cancelled and I got to Bill’s office about a half-hour early. As I opened the door I heard shouting.
Bill’s office was adjacent to the hotel’s kitchen, and I could easily hear him berating his servers. He ripped them for a good 15 minutes that I heard. It was loud and thorough. He drilled them into the ground. At the end he said, “Okay, now get out there and make our customers glad they came!”
Huh?
“Glad they came?” After that speech it was a miracle that nobody got poisoned that day.
Bill walked through the door, saw me and asked how long I had been there. I told him and he apologized. Then he quickly added, “You have to be on top of these young people every day. They’re lazy. If I don’t threaten them with their jobs, I get nothing out of them.”
He has told me of his plans to retire from the stress of the hotel restaurant business and probably open a small niche eatery of his own. My initial thoughts were:
- I’m glad Bill is retiring soon from the hotel business. Most of that industry’s employees are Gen Y. The longer he’s around the more working joy he will steal from a lot of young people.
- He’s going to have an incredibly hard time keeping good talent at his restaurant unless that operating system gets a much needed upgrade.
- If you’re going to correct a worker, do it after their shift and not just prior to them engaging your customers.
- I need to know if somebody like Bill is beating up on servers at the restaurants I visit (self-preservation!).
Bill is definitely not the Lone Ranger
So much of this goes on in organizations of all sizes today. Bill may be a dinosaur of sorts, but there are others who think like he does — at least to some degree — everywhere you go. Maybe they’ve tried to reason with young workers and failed, or provided training that made no difference, and they now resort to yelling and other negativity because that’s all they have left.
For these managers, there will be increasingly difficult and disappointing days ahead. The new generation of workers that is flooding into the workplace will change everything. People like Bill will have their ideas and positions challenged in ways they will find unimaginable and often intolerable.
They will become more and more confused and disenchanted with a workplace they feel no connection with, and their future will not be bright.
A few points of reality
- Gen Y (aka Millennials and Generation We) will teach their Boomer and Gen X managers a whole new way of dealing with workers. If we don’t learn well our jobs will be much tougher and our results less impressive.
- You can indeed scare someone into performing your way, short term. They will comply to save their job. However, you loosen the ties that bind them to you and eventually they will leave you.
- They will leave on their timetable, not yours. I’ve yet to have a valued worker resign at a good time for me. When good people walk out the door, it’s never a good time.
- Young people network today as no generation has before them. If you burn them it’s likely that the number of their peers who will learn about it and never consider you as a potential employer would take your breath away.
- You never get somebody’s best effort unless they want to give it to you. You’ll never get it by beating on them.
- You cannot get long term high performance through scare tactics.
Each generation desperately needs all the others, but many of us just can’t bring ourselves to admit that. If only we looked first to the good things that others bring, then we wouldn’t be so focused on the stuff we judge to be wrong or just plain weird.
I worry about my friend Bill and others like him. He’s a good man and a talented person. He’s just four decades behind in workplace relations.
How would you help him?

If you like this post please consider subscribing to our RSS/Email feed (on the menu bar) or following us on Twitter.





Leave a reply