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First, the latest issue of the T. T. Mitchell Consulting Newsletter, What Are You Afraid Of, is now available. Also, I realized I didn’t list the previous newsletter, Chain Of Command, so here it is also.

Right now I’m listening to a book on tape by Ken Follett. The main protagonist is the son of a man who’s not as rich as everyone thinks he is, who’s gotten himself into trouble by building up great gambling debts. Though his father bailed him out the first time to a tune of $50,000 pounds (the book is set in Scotland), this time he’s in debt for $250,000, and his father told him no. So, instead of owning up to his own problems and figuring out how to get out of trouble legitimately, his plan is to steal from his father in a major way because he feels that his father turned his back on him and owes him,… for something.

One of the subplots in the story is that the father works with someone he’s thinking about dating, and mentions it to his children. His oldest daughter says, not a direct quote, that she feels she and her children are entitled to the benefits of his wealth, and not some stranger who her father might decide to end up with in his old age.

This conversation about people and their thoughts on having a sense of entitlement is present in most businesses. When I was a manager, I used to hear people say that they deserved to be treated well because they always showed up to work on time, or hardly ever used their sick time. My thought was always “that’s your job”. People don’t get rewarded for doing exactly what they’re supposed to do. Comedian Chris Rock used to say that about men who fathered children saying “I take care of my children”; that’s their job.

Every once in awhile I do believe that someone has earned their right to an entitlement. A couple of years ago I said that if anyone had earned the right to comment on the state of black America in honest terms, it’s Bill Cosby, a man who not only broke many barriers, but has given a lot of money to black causes in his life and put many black people to work in jobs that they were traditionally excluded from. The day after Barack Obama was elected president, someone I know complained about the invocation Rev. Joseph Lowery gave near the end of the proceedings, saying if a white preacher had said what he’d said that he would have been booed off the stage. I wrote back that not only had he misunderstood what Rev. Lowery was saying (he was actually taking liberty with an old song whose lyrics were powerful during the Civil Rights movement and turning them into something positive), but that Rev. Lowery had been through some very tough times during the struggle for Civil Rights, including standing up to the possibility of being killed many times, and that he was someone who had earned the right to pretty much say anything he wanted to say, whether it had been positive or not.

How many of you have heard people say they’re entitled to something that they’re not? People who feel as though they’re being treated unfairly when, in reality, they’re taking advantage of the good or, can I say, soft nature of the person they report to, as well as the people they work with? What are your thoughts when you have to hear this, and do you ever take the time to deal with it?

If you don’t deal with it, your departments will suffer, because these people bring everyone else down, or stir some people into behavior that you don’t want infiltrating everyone else. As managers, sometimes you just have to do the hard thing for the right reasons.