Marc Haine talks to a grocery store owner who calls younger workers lazy, then interviews one employee who practices classical piano three hours daily. The real problem isn't laziness but boredom: the work doesn't challenge them enough. Managers need to coach employees and match tasks to what actually engages them.
I once talked to a business operator. He runs a grocery store franchise. And he came to me and he said, you know, it's the kids these days. Nobody wants to work. You schedule them, they don't show up. They don't want to work the hours and so on. They're lazy as all get-out. They don't want to do anything. You give them a task and then it takes them forever to do it because they get distracted by all sorts of stuff. I'm constantly seeing them on the phone and they don't get the work done as quick as I want them to. So I decided to interview one of his employees, and I said, you know, we were talking about the job, how's the job? He goes, ah, it's all right. It's just all right. Meh. Just all right. Oh goodness gracious. When I asked him about kind of what he does when he's not working, he was telling me that he's studying music. He's been doing music since he was in high school. Now he's in university studying music. He loves Classical piano. And I said, you know, what kind of work does he do in school? Like, what kinds of things? And he told me about some of his course load about music theory and that sort of thing. And I said, how do you feel about all that? He goes, oh my goodness. He said, it's so stimulating. He felt it was as hard to learn as math was when it came down to music theory. And it was really interesting. I said, just out of curiosity, you play piano. How often, how much time do you rehearse? He goes, I rehearse a minimum of 3 hours a day. I said, 7 days a week? He goes, yep, 7 days a week. I rehearse 3 hours a day, 7 days a week. Now this is a guy who his boss has just said he can't concentrate on anything for very long. He takes forever to do stuff. And it's like, how is it possible that we have this dichotomy between how he performs at work and how he performs when he's playing piano? Would it be fair to say at work he's not being challenged? When he's sitting at his piano, he's being challenged. And that's the big thing is finding out what motivates people to get them to perform at their highest level means that we have to stop managing through our job descriptions. We have to take off the hat of a manager and put on a hat of a coach.
