Killing Motivation #3 - The Wrong Training

Hurrah! You have been allowed to use 40 hours of your working year to training in ....whatever. But then you receive an email saying that you must attend a talk presented by a Toupeyed perfumed gigolo-executive on some Three Letter Acronym (TLA) and this talk counts against your training.

Your training time now has become devalued to that of Canadian Tire Money, or the European equivalent, the Euro.

Not only is the TLA made up, but we are informed that we must be part of our DNA. So we have taken a scientific term based on research, considered scientific opinion, and fact, and reduced it to the level of bullshit. It's a sad, sad day for the human species.

I am  not sure what the colour of the sky is in your world but its not clear to me what I could  possibly learn to make me a better productive contributor than spending hours on a imaginary subject like one of hundreds that the upper floors float like a bad fart in an elevator.

Dignify that email with a special place in the spam folder aaaaaannnnnnndddd ....flush.

Your ego owns the fast lane.

So you are in the fast lane doing 120 klicks in your red Chrysler van. You see me catching up on the inside. So what do you do? 

You speed up because you know its against the law for anybody to be faster than your ego, fragile that it is. Once you realize that nobody can pass you on the right, since there are other vehicles doing 120 klicks on the right you slow to 120 klicks. 

Now we have gridlock. Thank you. I was scared that your esteem issues would get the better of you, big man.

Nobody can pass you, nobody can get by you, all you have to do is stay in the fast lane doing the same speed as the middle lane.

Fortunately for the rest of us you have to exit. We can continue, safe from your retardedness. And to be fair, your plate told me you weren't quite from Ottawa. But I have seen this ego-lunancy from Ottawa before. Its really a human species thing.

Killing Motivation #2 - Training

Nothing tells your employees that you care like investing in them. This is normally in the form of training. Training your employees, sending them to courses, and paying for their courses, tells them that you care about their development, their career, and their place in the organization.

But what if you don't care? What if you think that your employees are merely vessels to drain and then dispose of?

In this case, not paying for training is clearly insufficient. What you need to add is a mind game.

To do this you first of all have to tell your employees at large that you support training and that you will pay for it and that includes trips to far flung exotic places like New Jersey. Then, while the poor suckers look for a course that would be appropriate them to be a better skilled employee in the company you send out an email indicating that there are "internal" and "no cost" mechanisms (like reading a book) that would fulfil the training offer. Even better, suggest they spend an hour googling some subject. If they attempt to request a course then deny it, claiming their is no budget.

Nothing says "We don't give a shit" like a good mind game.