By Jack Cumming

Many people start off with great enthusiasm for their career. Over time, though, they may feel stagnant, underappreciated, or unseen. With a little more time and the frustration of feeling trapped, unease can turn to suppressed rage.

Taken for Granted

There are two sides to this. First is management’s response. The recalcitrant employee can’t give you the best performance while they’re caught up in anger and resentment. You may not even recognize the problem, so you may dismiss it as lackluster performance and then move toward dismissal, as commonly occurs with burnout in corporate America.

Then, there’s the employee. Health insurance may be the trap. How many employees keep working just because they can’t risk the health insurance gap if they move elsewhere? There are other traps as well. Vesting is one. Compensation and benefit advisers create incentives for people to stay. Employees may see them as traps more than incentives.

All this came to mind recently when I stumbled across an anonymous social media posting that read:

Our youngest is finishing college, and the stress of college costs will soon be behind us. We calculated that we can make it to age 95 (we just turned 52) if we retire in one year and take Social Security at age 62.

At this point, the anonymous poster let loose with all the frustrations that were twisting life into a knot of angry suffering.

Now that I see a path toward freedom, my tolerance for any and all corporate BS … from micromanaging me in a role I’ve been doing for over a decade, to arrogant young senior directors, to a new batch of executives reinventing the company for the third time in 15 years by repeating the same crap from 20 years ago that didn’t work then, to eliminating work-from-home flexibility one day a week, when most of our “face to face” work is done over Zoom because we have global offices and management takes calls from their offices rather than coming to meeting rooms, to the suit and tie crowd rushing around the halls with an air of remarkable self-importance, to stage gates and alignment and synergistic value added drivers and light touch efforts and thoughtful workforce reductions (thoughtful … that’s a good one) and we must stay focused and control what we can control to keep costs down while delivering shareholder value and … and on and on and on.

Sick. Of. It.

The wisdom to be gleaned is evident once we hear the inner voice that cries out desperately to be heard in the quote above. First, never build a trap to hold your employees against their will. Help employees who want to leave make the change. Their replacements will be happy for the job and will bring motivation to their performance.

Break Out of the Trap

The flip side of this wisdom goes to the employee. Never let yourself be trapped. This calls for risk acceptance. The risk of leaving voluntarily may be less than the risk of staying put. Your unconscious hurt and attitude may bring you that unwelcome dismissal notice. Sure, you can calculate your severance package, but is that worth enduring the pain that our anonymous poster ventilated for others like her or him to read? No, it’s not.

The candid post closed with an acknowledgement, known to us all, that such frustration is not unique to a single individual but to many caught up in corporate dynamics. The poster wrote, “I’m not looking for advice. I’m just venting in a forum that has other folks that probably get it.”

Senior living is a people business. We should be able to let people vent to us, and we should have the insight and kindness to help them get beyond the Corporate Trap. You might add … “if only we knew.” You should know. What are you or your HR department doing to take the pulse of all employees to know how they feel? Are you caught up in your own dilemmas and missing the call of leadership?

Steve Moran has a substack blog that can help, “Practical Passionate Leadership.” Check it out. Business is about people. Money follows people. It pays to take care of your people.