Hard Work

I don’t like people who feign hard work. I’ve seen individuals who put so much effort into making it look like they are working that the faking requires more energy than the actual work.
That’s dedication – of a sort.

How do I know? Well, I first saw it in New York when I was working for my father. He was a former Marine Engineer and had a good understanding of how much labor was required to maintain a steam plant, retube a boiler, or any of the tasks necessary to keep power and heating plants going. He’d point out the “lick and a promise” approaches that some people used. He also taught me that you must know the processes you expect people to complete competently. Reading a manual did not cut it. Leadership and management was not a scatterbrained process of telling people where to go and what to do.

After my government job ended, I had good reason to recall the early lessons. By day and during the weekends, I was a marine woodcarver creating quarter boards, transom banners, and portraits of people’s boats. But every evening, I was loading trucks at a UPS facility.
Small businesses do not pay benefits, and I had four children needing medical and dental coverage. UPS provided a generous full-time benefits package for its part-time workers. After a while I became a supervisor, and rediscovered the wisdom of all my father had taught me.

To be clear, almost all the Teamsters I worked with were hard-working individuals with excellent work ethics, and I enjoyed my time with them. But like all workplaces, the “sup” has to lead the way, and you can’t do that if you don’t know the job.

So you ask, what does this have to do with people who fake hard work? Among the things I learned at UPS was that hard workers don’t like fakers, slackers and cheats. Sooner or later they have to clean up or complete the work the slacker did not do. But you, as the “sup”, are responsible for sniffing them out, correcting the behavior, or helping them out the door.

Being the boss is not just about giving orders.