Another aspect to the perils of collectivism is the cheerleader for the concept of a “TEAM” especially when great emphasis is placed on the specific terminology. One of the premier drivers of social and economic socialism is the desire to hide one’s cowardly behavior under the blanket of society pointing to the greedy management of some organization to rise up against and overtake. But then there are those who provide justification to the cowardly by becoming abusive tyrants when given authority through position who are clueless and inept attempting to hide their minor dictatorships behind the concept of a “TEAM.”

Many years ago I worked at one of many fast food restaurants and without question I was one of their most productive workers. However, the manager there and I did not get along. She was a raging feminist who was attempting to live all her life’s failures through her career decisions hoping beyond hope that a successful management career would somehow off-set two decades of diabolical personal decision-making mistakes. She looked for respect not by earning it, but simply because she had schemed some executive within the company to give her responsibility and that by simple virtue of a nameplate identifying her as a “boss” she had earned the right to infinite respect. Well, she was wrong.

 

At this job I was just a grill cook—but I was the fastest in the area and I could work two lines by myself saving the company two staffed positions, sometimes three, four, up to five so I knew the value I brought to the table. I also knew that this manager’s role within the company was purely ornamental; after all she was a young woman who helped their staffing numbers—especially in management, and fit the profile of what corporate wanted to see on paper for their labor statistics. However, she was ineffective as far as official management duties often carrying her store over staffed, under stocked, and ill prepared for dinner rushes. And because she treated everyone like slaves on her personal plantation the workers would lay down on her and refuse to give her a good shift of productive output—because they didn’t respect her. They simply showed up to collect a check.

I’ve always believed in authenticity so I never pandered to her authority or the company overall. I let her know that I could see that she didn’t know what she was doing and I offered to help her help herself if she needed proper counseling on how to perform such an elusive task. But of course she thought she knew everything so she refused to listen—instead she chose to pick fights with me at every turn which ultimately sealed her fate.

When a member of corporate came through the drive thru window to check on things and see how the store was operating—he asked how things were going. I told him that the store manager had no idea what she was doing and that she was pushing his margins toward the negative needlessly. Of course he wanted to know more where I proceeded to disassemble her piece by piece which was easy because she had been hiding her ineptitude behind a love for her title and the authority it wielded. When she had to actually be accountable, she was absolutely clueless and had no resort but to fall on her feminist teachings accusing the executive and me of being prejudice against her because she was a woman in a man’s world and all that other nonsense. Of course I told the executive that too, right in front of her which sent her deeper into defense without being able to bring up anything professionally which justified her continued existence as manager of that store. Instead she leaned on her title, her authority, and her sex to shield her ineptitude from further social judgment.

The executive gave her another store after that encounter putting her into a really bad neighborhood where the workforce was much more antagonistic toward management. The store was already performing poorly so she couldn’t screw that up any worse. She had a nervous breakdown within two months and actually ended up in the hospital for psychological treatment. The reason was that she had to actually perform to hold her job and not rely on titles or even her feminism to shield her incompetence—so with no other option to lean on she had a mental breakdown as her only escape from the situation.

 

I felt bad for the manager only in that she had to take things so far before she actually listened. But she should have known better than to think I was going to let her abuse me and others just to fill her own ego with pride as a second-hander. I used that example of failed leadership because it is one of the easier to explain—and one of the shortest examples of how top down incompetence can fuel the collective desire for communist concepts like socialism, unionism, or committee driven consensus—it is because leaders fail to lead when they place the value of their positions on a nameplate or organization chart instead of the actual performance of the position.   In my past I have so many examples of such conflict with authority similar to that above story that I can’t even remember them all—given that I have an excellent memory, it should provide context to the multitude. Behind me is a dark and bloody river of many such conflicts and people from my past reading this—which of course they do can offer nothing in defense because they know it’s all true. The difference is that I never felt compelled to join with others to solve any of these problems. I simply confronted those targets with the truth about their real desire for power—and exposed them to the people who fund the endeavors.

There have of course been more men than women but in general there are far too many people who enter the work force believing that a title of authority will grant them power they otherwise don’t have. Once they get this power they find they need their egos constantly massaged and instead of their productive effort going into making money for their company’s needs, they use the workforce as their personal playground of boosting their own internal worthlessness. They often use authority to mask their own incompetence which they hope will go undetected from behind their commands. But it never does—people can naturally detect bullshit and immediately set about ways to protect themselves from it—which leads often to collective unification against a tyrant. So in the end both sides end up wrong and the business suffers or goes out of existence all together unable to produce a profit.

 

I have been in the business of making omelets and to do that you have to break a lot of eggs. In that metaphor of course eggs represent the ego of the type of people who fall in love with power out of their own insecurity. This has been exposed at the Lakota school district, many businesses, and within several organizations and I have behind me a lot of omelets made and eaten by grateful financial interests. And the omelet making will continue wherever I am at the time—because I personally have no tolerance for abuse of leadership. It’s not a mystery that requires collective endeavor to stand up against—all it takes is a good heart, a clean conscience, and a will to do well. If one possesses those traits they will find that they can move mountains and solve the world’s problems just by showing up for work without malice or social gratification.

Most businesses that fail do so because of poor leadership at the top. Most organizations are weak and next to worthless because they have people running them who care more about the nameplates on their desk than in accomplishing the task at hand. And government is filled with poor leaders who seek office not on merit but by popularity allowing them to believe they are important when in fact they are just more examples of detrimental human frailties. The way to fix all these issues is to recognize the attributes of proper leadership as the values are removed from social consensus and instead based upon individual performance. And for the worker who thinks they are at the bottom of the food chain and not able to do anything about the tyrant they work for, take it from someone who knows very well, if you are a superior worker and bring a good heart to your business backed by honesty you will find that your employer will value you far more than the guy with the brass nameplate on their desk. And your counsel will be very valuable because it is so rare these days to have such authentic people on a payroll.   Don’t be afraid to expose an idiot when they present themselves. The cost in not doing so only brings misery to more people for a longer period of time needlessly. In the end, it’s not just you who will suffer, but everyone else.

 

A TEAM is not something where everyone contributes equally. A “team” is where a leader rallies people behind a common cause not out of duty—but respect. Not everyone is capable of being a leader. Most people are terrified of it. But if you are one of the rare few who are of leadership quality be careful when nameplate lovers start using the word TEAM to describe an enterprise. The reason they do it is to cover their own ineptitude and to piggy back off your efforts so they can use your leadership to mask their own fallacies using the designation of a “TEAM” to perform the task. When a politician says the words, “we did it as a team” look carefully at what is going on behind their words—because there is likely something hidden there they are trying to mask. Likely what it is will be a series of abused people who have done all the work and lost the credit to a politician who seeks to associate themselves with success by gradually taking over the enterprise by putting their nameplate upon it and expecting their authority position to allow them to do it without question. When that happens there really is no choice, its time to make some omelets by breaking several eggs and making something positive out of a bunch of broken shells and the contents which ooze from them once shattered. It takes a leader to do the shattering and to see the need for an ordered up omelet.

Rich Hoffman

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