I hear from a lot of readers, and a decent-size chunk of them are retired CEOs. I guess that makes sense. It could be fun and satisfying to read business advice once you have time to think about workplace topics in the abstract, vs. having dozens of priorities to juggle every day and precious little energy left over to devote to leadership and talent management and the other things I write about.
A great deal of my retired-CEO mail floods in when I write about leadership. The retired-CEO population (or at least the subset of it that writes to me) is split roughly down the middle in its views on the employer-employee relationship. When I write something like, “An employee’s job is to give 100 percent at the job every day, and an employer’s job is to give the employee a reason to come back to work tomorrow,” half of my retired-CEO correspondents say, “Hear, hear!” The other half write, “That’s horrible of you. What’s happened to the American work ethic? You should be telling people to knuckle down and make money for their employers.”
I chuckle at the second set of letters. What has happened to the American work ethic, after all? I remember hearing about the American work ethic when I was a little kid. My dad worked at the same company for 35 years. That company’s name reverberated in our household like an overarching good presence, the place where Dad went every day and where our day-to-day sustenance and college funding originated. I don’t think I questioned (nor did my parents, as far as I know) the stability of the family income during the whole of my childhood. It was a non-issue. Same for my friends’ parents. (And if someone lost his job, it was a neighborhood event, a semi-tragedy that moms spoke about quietly with one another or with their husbands when out of earshot of the kids.)
My dad had that true-blue work ethic, and I don’t blame him. It’s part of who he was, but he also had every good reason to believe his employer would do the right thing by him year in and year out, and it did. It was a different time. Who would take an entry-level sales job out of college and go on to have eight kids under the assumption that more and more responsible and lucrative work would emerge in time to sustain the growing family? That wasn’t a bad bet in 1950. It would be financial folly today.
The old saw, “It’s not supposed to be fun—that’s why they call it work,” is one of my grumpy former-CEO pen pals’ favorite rants. The crazy part is, I don’t believe for one second any one of those guys (all guys, so far, in my retired-CEO fan club) actually managed that way during his corner-office days. My take is that when I talk about the non-Scroogey, humanistic leadership style on paper, it looks wimpy and communist. (These aren’t my adjectives—they come from my curmudgeonly CEO homies.) Any CEO who managed a company like a Theory X autocrat for years on end would probably have dropped dead of a heart attack long before retirement. But who knows? I’m not sure anyone has looked at the correlation. Still, I don’t believe that the crustiest of my online critics really managed people through the lens of, “It’s a job—just do it.” That would be really foolish of them if they did.
“It’s not supposed to be fun—that’s why they call it work” makes no sense at all from a management perspective. If you take apart the logic for one second, it falls completely apart. No CEO would knowingly keep someone in his shop who came to work every day and slogged through his or her duties because of the paycheck, would he? Work has to be fun. If it isn’t fun, the CEO so quick to say, “That’s why they call it work,” is screwing himself over.
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