When I’m the boss, I expect the people under me to be adults. So I speak to them like adults, tell them my expectations, let them accomplish their tasks without micromanaging things, and we all get along fine. Usually, the people under me do things well, and other times, they do the absolute minimum, and it shows. But I always try to be professional, and treat people around me professionally, and I try to be generous with my (genuine) appreciation and my (genuine) compliments, and when I have a problem, I deal with it as it comes.
There are other employers in this area, however, that are not run so politely. There’s one restaurant in particular where the woman who manages it is a very nice church lady on Sunday— but she has the reputation of being a terrible boss. By the nature of the restaurant biz, you don’t keep a solid staff-- you get a lot of first-time high school kids-- opioid addiction is a big problem in our area-- so you get a good number of lazy good-for-nothings who put in a week or two and then fall off the planet. So I can see how that would be frustrating, to try and run a biz without dependable people. But by the same token, I know of at least two people who were dependable, got-it-together, hard-working adults… and she ran them both off because she didn’t differentiate between the slackers and the reliable employees in the way she spoke to them/treated them. And reliable employees aren’t going to tolerate abuse for long, because they have confidence in their skillset, and they’re not going to waste their time when the management isn’t appreciative enough to treat them with basic dignity and respect.
