where to start? in order to not hate your life... you will either need to actually BE dumb, or dumb down your intelligence level when you walk through the door every morning. you will get hired if you can speak english about as well as you can pick up a telephone (assuming you have hands). after that... all you need to do is pick up that phone, dial, and say the exact same thing that is on the paper - nothing more and nothing less, over and over until lunch when you will get EXACTLY 60 minutes before you need to be back in your seat and on that phone. two seconds late is unacceptable because you mustn't miss a junior manager with absolutely NO speaking skills try to motivate you twice a day who is OBVIOUSLY being forced to give you this pep talk because they aren't even motivated themselves. #counterproductive
if you do that for them though then they will love you, as long as you don't challenge them (that part is key). they will literally count the number of seconds you have that phone in your hand and, like i said, will make you hate life if the other monkeys work faster than you. they do not care about the quality over quantity curve. try explaining to them that even a robotic assembly line needs to work at a reasonable pace or quality will be sacrificed - they won't care. the 8-hour work day was designed back in the industrial age because it maximizes physical labor. a healthy human mind is not capable of such a consistently low level of operation. even in management training they drill, "a good leader is a good follower". actually NO! even in the military, blind obedience is a bad thing *see WWII. one of THEE MOST criticized leadership mistakes that experts try to point out among corporate professionals is micro-managing. NLP confidently declares that "some people need to be micro-managed" NOPE! the truth is that no one should ever be micro-managed. if there is anyone on your team that needs someone constantly looking over their shoulder in order to make sure that he or she is working effectively after they have been adequately trained then YOU made a hiring error. PERIOD
upper management preaches to their workers how their customers must always come first, and THEN their employees are a close second priority. even if they truly believe that... they need to stop saying it. customers cannot ever be satisfied when they are dealing with such obviously disgruntled employees. and when they say "customers" what the staff hears is " the customers' money" anyway. if they focused more on people and product, and a lot less on the money then maybe customers would come AND return because they like dealing with a company that has a happy staff selling a product that they are proud of.
upper management also doesn’t take into consideration how cripplingly demotivating unkept promises and moving targets can be. if an incentive for reaching a sales goal is the reward of a nice hiking trip in the mountains, but after reaching said goal... hiking in the mountains turns into a picnic at a local park, or a skiing trip incentive ends up being bowling and pizza after work... the staff will stop believing in you - and trust is quite important! if an employee is extremely successful - hitting record sponsorship targets, and making a lot of money in commissions by doing so... don't move the target on them, restructuring their contracted commission package so that more of that money goes to the company instead of in the employee's pocket because the staff will question your loyalty - and trust is quite important! if you fire people who challenge you when they feel things aren’t right the staff will fear your judgement – and trust is quite important!
taking responsibility for mistakes is virtuous. the high-ups at NLP always toss around blame, but very VERY rarely grant the staff the comfort of knowing that management realizes where it went wrong, and is in the process of fixing it. they will beat you down morally and place personal blame on you for an event doing poorly, assign the same event to you the next time it comes around and tell you not to worry because the problem previously was that the conference dates weren’t optimal. you realize that they had you so super stressed out when it was never your fault because they don’t have the integrity of good leaders. they are like coaches who are losing a big game... call a time-out, and then tell the team, "hey! you should really try to score more points. now go do it!" yeah, brilliant strategy but HOW maybe?!?! (*revert back to the section about quantity over quality, and you could rightly assume that the advice is to just do A LOT more of the same thing that's not working)
you never know when you will get paid so don't make monthly plans like paying rent because they are insensitive to the fact that they are in charge of people with bills and families that really depend on that payment coming in on time.
i know these folks well, and i do NOT consider any of them racists. HOWEVER, comments are made from time to time that are extremely tasteless and that would not be tolerated in western cultures. a team leader who, even if they are oblivious to the fact, could probably be considered a racist by most modern standards... really needs to be made to sit through some diversity acceptance courses or something. imagine a place where you have one of the leaders repeatedly declaring on a daily basis how they hate calling "these people" (referring to indians, italians, or americans are her most frequented cluster) because they are so *insert insanely inappropriate generalization here* so yeah, i can also see how one might argue the case that the place can be culturally insensitive.
