Five Phrases it Pays to Extinguish
Keep a keen ear out for these culture killers
Welcome back to The Workaround. I’m Bob, your host 👋
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Life is full of little phrases that make us flinch…
“We’re still waiting for our flight crew to arrive.”
“Due to an accident overnight, the bridge is closed for repair until further notice.”
“I saw something that concerns me, and I’d like to run more tests.”
They bring immediate annoyance and the worrying prospect of more pain.
New phrases plague you once you first take over a team or start a company…
“Do you have a few minutes to talk?” (The Friday at 5 pm meeting where your star employee announces she’s resigning.)
“Our client says the check is coming.” (When you’re two days from payroll.)
“We’re announcing an exciting new direction for the company.” (How every announcement of corporate layoffs begins.)
Phrases like those are hard to do anything about. However, leading a business gives you many other opportunities to listen for and correct problems.
It took me decades of work to compile the following list of phrases. Ignore them at your peril…
“That’s not my job”
In high school, I spent my summers doing manual labor—mowing lawns and moving furniture for one of my uncle’s accounting clients. But when I returned home from my first year of college, I decided it was time to find indoor work.
I had neither connections nor experience, so I signed up for a job with the local Kelly Services temp agency. I’d get a call from Kelly around 7 pm on a given day, requesting that I show up for work at a random company the next morning. One day, I was working in an architecture firm’s copy room. The next day, I was packing boxes on a pork rind assembly line.
Everyone should spend a summer sampling the world of work this way. As a stranger in strange lands, I was wide-eyed and conscious of every input. I also wanted to make a good impression so that Kelly would assign me to more interesting jobs as the summer progressed.
I particularly remember the day I was asked to go to a department store in a local outlet mall. The Women’s Clothing Department needed extra staff to fold and return clothing to its racks during a major sale. I laugh to myself as I write this—here I am, a 19-year-old boy whose mother still folded his clothes, now getting paid to do the job.
But, hey, I did the job so well that they asked me to return the next day!
On that second day, I was in the middle of putting a blouse back on a hanger when a customer asked me whether the items on “my rack” were 50% off the tagged price or if the tag was already marked down 50%. I had no clue—but I saw “Maggie,” a fellow temp who had been working a few days longer. I asked the customer to wait a moment and walked over to Maggie to ask if she knew the answer. Maggie replied:
“That’s not my job…go find a clerk.”
I felt verbally slapped in the face and felt terrible for the customer left in limbo back at my rack. Eventually, I found help, and we sorted it out. That phrase didn’t sit well with me, but it sure stuck in my head. Kelly called that night to say the store loved me and wanted me to return. I asked for something different.
“Not My Job”—NMJ for short—is easy to poke at here first. We’ve all heard it—and hate it. It can be worded or acted out in various ways. I recall interviewing someone who said he insisted on keeping his laptop at the office—refusing to lift a finger between 9 to 5, M thru F.
And I will never forget my team working on a big agency pitch on a Saturday to meet a client deadline. Our tech lead didn’t show up or let us know that he wouldn’t be coming into the office. On Monday, he shrugged and said, “Sorry, I decided to have a weekend.”
I also dislike the phrase, “If you don’t come in on Saturday, don’t bother coming in on Sunday.” Work has its limits. However, the present and future of business must be flexible. If your company culture allows for NMJ, you’re in deep doo-doo.
“We can’t handle more business”
A few years ago, I found myself working at a big public company to which we sold our startup. It was December, and each day I was dragged into meetings about how the company was in danger of missing the sales number it had promised Wall Street.
We considered and implemented all kinds of desperate tactics. We found ways to pull January deals in early, offered special SPIFFS to the sales team, and gave customers deep “one-time-only” discounts. These were all tactics we employed to squeak into hitting our number last quarter, too.
During one of these days of pressure, I read an email from the Head of Operations declaring that his team wouldn’t handle any orders after December 10th. He personally chose to stop additional revenue at a time of crisis.
Now, if you’ve ever started a company, you know how FUCKING HARD IT IS TO GET REVENUE! You don’t say No! You say, “YES, and…here’s how we can make that happen.”
Whether your company is in crisis—or your clients dug money out of their couch cushions and need to spend it within 24 hours before the fiscal year is over—you FIND A WAY. There is no greater tragedy in business than turning down revenue.1 You lose money in the short term, and you lose clients’ trust forever.
Once I let my blood pressure settle, I saw an opportunity. I pulled together my product’s leadership team, and we devised a plan to handle the work if the sales team sold our product. We helped save the company’s year and added a nice chunk of change toward our earn-out goal. No one on my team missed Christmas, and we all felt great about rallying to the cause.
“It’s up to Management…”
I first heard this when I was a partner at a digital agency—my first job managing a large team and where I owned a stake in the company.
I was in a huddle room, having a 1-on-1 with John, one of my Account Supervisors, who led a team with about $1 million in business. John and I were strategizing about how to staff a big new project, and the topic of creative resources came up. He told me:
“I’d really like to have Kerry on that business, but I guess it’s up to management to decide.”
My first thought was, “Who’s ‘management’?”
Many mid-career people I’ve hired are used to receiving direction from senior leaders who like to decide everything. But that’s not how our agency worked, and certainly not how you build any High-Performing Organization.
So, I gently smiled and told John that as the leader of his business, we expect him to lead our thinking. There is no special class of managers—we’re all in this together. We exist to help them, not take over all the decision-making.
The other day, I visited a client’s office. On one of its walls, the phrase “There is no They” was painted. I couldn’t have said it better!
“Why bother? They’ll change something else soon anyway”
Actually, I believe I overheard this one while in the bathroom stall one day.
I was at the headquarters building of the company that bought our startup. As two people washed their hands, they spoke about a new re-organization that the company had recently announced.
As the months progressed, I saw more changes announced and more collective yawns from their employees. At one point, someone told me the company's “unofficial” motto was, “If you don’t like how things are going, just wait a few days, and something might change for the better.”
This is a sign that your changes are just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Making organizational changes can be vitally important, but they must be handled like plutonium. Great care, communication, enrollment, and engagement are required for the people affected by change to help them achieve the promised improvement. And once you make the change, you must commit and see it through.
If your team is not onboard and supportive, they can clog the works in many ways you will never see—until your ship sinks.
“I’m not sure if I’m allowed to take a mid-day doctor’s appointment”
This is a small one but a potential sign of something bigger.
At my last startup, our Head of HR, Jeff, suggested we try a tool called Office Vibe. It’s email-based software that sends short surveys to employees weekly, like an evolved suggestion box.
I was addicted from the start.
I would receive results from the previous week’s surveys each Monday morning. The numbers, graphs, and trends were interesting, but I jumped first to the written feedback. Researchers call these open-ended responses, and I’ve always found them to be the richest veins of insights.
One day, I saw a response that read: “I’m new to the company and still trying to get my feel for the place. Everyone on my team is always on Slack, and it makes me feel like I’ve got to reply immediately, no matter when. I’m not even sure if I can take a doctor’s appointment in the middle of the day.”
My heart sank. I felt terrible that this person was suffering—especially because they didn’t need to.
At our weekly “Drink ‘n Learn” all-hands meeting that Friday afternoon, I stood up and read this comment aloud. Then I asked the group, “Is this true?”
One after another, people assured the anonymous new employee that we didn’t expect always-on work. They shared tips on using the out-of-office settings during those appointments and clicking do-not-disturb when distraction-free time was needed. This also helped us all be aware that new employees need some help fitting in—and that maybe we should come up with some company-wide Slack rules of (dis)engagement.
And I didn’t have to say another word.
Diagnosing, Deal, and Avert Disaster
Once your company is past the Zero to One stage, you—as its leader—should have almost nothing to do with selling, serving, and/or coding your company's sausage. But you’ve got a whole new job: Listening becomes, oh, about 90% of what you should be doing all day.
Here’s how to deal with these five phrases and many more:
Monitor—If business is going well, your main job is to look for threats to the money-making machine. Tools like Office Vibe are great. I also believe in setting up quarterly 1-on-1 chats with every employee. And you can learn a lot just by watching what people are talking about openly on Slack.
It’s not them. It’s you—Early on, when you see the worrying words, your temptation will be to blame and punish someone else. But we must look at ourselves. These words are a sign of something wrong in the business you built. Take responsibility for understanding and fixing the bigger issue that leads people to think and speak this way.
Throw the flag—When your team is playing the game, your position is often that of the referee. So when you see a foul, throw the flag and make sure the issue is addressed immediately. Bring it up at a company meeting, or gently correct the person if you hear these phrases firsthand.
Diagnose—Dig in further to find the source of potential culture issues. Is a new employee that’s not fitting in? Is growth breaking something that used to work well? There’s always a reason. Ask “why” until you find it.
Repair if necessary—Seek lots of input and support when making organizational changes. If an employee is not a culture fit and is making life worse for everyone else, move quickly to remove them before they infect others.
…and keep going through this cycle over and over again.
There will always be a new problem or a different squeaky wheel. But once you expect this—and have a model of dealing with it—the job becomes…kind of fun!
Today, I wince less when these words come up; instead, I see the opportunity to teach. Once others see the truth and are enrolled to help address the issue, they, too, will monitor and fix problems without fear—and they’ll do it when you’re not around.
That’s when you hear more of my favorite sound in teamwork: Laughter.
P.S. Here’s two more…
“We’ve always done it this way.”—This one is often said in defense of continuing what worked at one point in the past but doesn’t any longer. When you hear it, stop and help this person see that change/adaptation/evolution is required for any system to survive.
“That’ll never work!”—My friend Paul Fisher brought this one up in the comments below. Check out his post for a great story proving it can work.
How we might work together…
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A2 Influence is our content development agency that helps some of the biggest brands and retailers create and distribute authentic content at scale, including social+influencer. The team just scored a partnership with Walmart. CEO Rob Reinfeld would love to share our approach.
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BONUS: Cool Content of the Week
A little something I found meaningful. You might agree…
Don’t Poke the Bear
While we’re on the topic of things we shouldn’t say, here’s one we shouldn’t do…
I took my dog for a long walk through downtown Cincinnati a few Sundays ago. We passed in front of the global headquarters of Procter & Gamble, the company that brought me to this city in 1999. My second marketing assignment at the company was on the Tide brand. It has the largest revenue in the U.S. and dominates the laundry detergent category in nearly every measure. Working on this product that half the country uses was a point of pride and a highlight of my career.
There is a billboard in the parking lot across the street from P&G. It’s one that drivers along 5th Street could barely see. But it’s facing company employees at their desks. So, the space is only purchased by advertisers that want to send a message to headquarters.
Over the years this signage has been popular with vendors who would love to have P&G brands as a client. Sometimes, those brands would ask their media agencies to buy the space in order to show off to their company peers. But eventually, policy halted this practice.
But on this day, I saw a competitor chose to send a message to the Tide team:
Well, congratulations to the All brand for beating Tide on this measure. I’m sure someone on the All team was tickled to make this ad buy.
However, I don’t recommend spiking the football in your opponent’s face. I’m confident this has caused quite a reaction across the street. Always beware of people who take work personally…
Of course, there are exceptions—like selling what you can’t deliver, working for awful clients, etc. But this was core work for great clients.
Especially love the “Not my job” and the “not sure about doctors appt.”
One other I’d through out there is “That’ll never happen!” It really grinds my gears as Peter Griffin says.