24 Nov 2025 · 3 min
John Jonas describes being wrongly accused at a mountain bike race and choosing not to fight back. He connects that to managing a difficult team member: people perform better when they feel good about themselves, especially workers in the Philippines who depend on the job.
Hello, and welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing Podcast, the podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing your work. My name is John Jonas, and this is episode 21. People need to feel good about themselves. So the last couple episodes, I've talked about the state championship mountain bike race that we were at, and I'm going to talk about it again today because something happened at it that made me blow my lid. So during the bike race, I got a text from the race director. And now keep in mind with this, there are literally thousands of people at the race. The text that I got says, if you cause any more grief in the feed zone, you'll be permanently banned from the Feed Zone. So the feed zone is this area where as the racers come through on a lap, you're allowed to hand a bottle to them. So you can hand them a water bottle so that, you know, they drink their water and you give them another bottle. It's hot or whatever, you know, they need more water, fuel, nutrition, whatever. So I get this text and I flipped out. I was furious. Just out of my mind. There are thousands people at the race. There were hundreds of different people in the Feed Zone, and I didn't do anything different than any other person. And I got singled out for causing grief, which I didn't do. So my initial reaction was to lash out. Oh, I just wanted to tell her the whole story. I wanted to tell her what did and what didn't happen in the Feed Zone. I had this whole conversation in my mind. In fact, all night long, I just kept having this conversation about what I was gonna say to her the next day if I saw her. And when I saw her the next day, she actually came right up to me. I didn't say anything. I was just nice. And I let it go. And the race ended, and we're fine, and nothing ever came of it. I'm not banned from the Feed Zone. This will never happen again. So at the same time, this is going on and I'm super, super frustrated. Julia, who manages a team for our social media presence, dealing with one of the people on my team who's lashing out at her and lashing out at other team members, and it's making the team just not work well. It's causing problems. So Julia came to me for advice, but my advice was the lashing out just doesn't work for our team. You gotta treat people well, and we've tried really hard to treat this person well, and this person's not treating others correctly. So it's time to just let her go. And we're in the process of letting her go right now. She's actually a really great worker, skilled, reliable, shows up, talented. Her personality is just clashing. And I think part of the reason Julia came to me was because I've managed a lot of people and I've learned that people need to feel good about themselves. Like if someone is causing people not to feel good, work suffers. Having work suffer, well, you know that doesn't work. And Julia wasn't feeling good and other team members weren't feeling good because of the lashing out that was happening. So in managing your ofs, think about how they feel about themselves based off of the way you're treating them. Thinking about this will help you prevent the disappearing Filipino problem. It can help prevent work suffering. How people feel about themselves based off of how they're treated is a big deal, especially in the Philippines.
