People are assets, but don’t let individuals become liabilities

By Lucia Mabasa 

The New Year is upon us! We have got brand new diaries, heads full of ideas and notebooks filled with to do lists for the first few weeks as we get back in harness.

But all the best intentions mean nothing if we don’t put the people that make up our teams at the top of all our to do lists. We might not feel it immediately, but by the time June rolls around the ship will start creaking and by September it might even be listing.The good news is that we can fix it right now – before we even set sail into 2025.Personnel are our greatest asset, that’s why we now refer to the old HR departments as People and Culture.

But they are potentially our greatest liability too. Like any important relationship we can’t live without them even if it often feels as if we can live without them. Just like any other relationship it’s vital to make sure that we are all on the same page, which we do by making the three Cs: consistency clarity and communication, our mantra.

It is all very well creating an enabling environment, in fact every company should strive towards being welcoming and accommodating of the “whole person”, but the whole person has to understand that the “whole person” has to come to work. For far too long the post-COVID gurus have been urging us to welcome the zany and off-beat to unleash our creativity and potential, but our employees must realise that the price for being quirky in the workplace is delivering on what they are supposed to do.

There is nothing more soul destroying for a manager than coming to work in the first week of the new year and being faced with a raft of leave requests from an employee that cleverly brackets every public holiday to maximise the benefit to themselves. People always think it’s terribly clever. It isn’t, it’s terribly selfish. It’s the same as staff who moan that they are taking time to “find themselves” or expecting the company to understand that they need time off (normally on company time) to watch their kids get prizes or play sport. It’s the same when it comes to dealing with misfortune and mourning.

Every company wants to be as benevolent as possible, but it is vital that there is a balance, both for the company’s needs and for the colleagues. Last year we spoke about companies in other parts of the world that gave non-smokers more days off than smokers, because the non-smokers were always at their desks while the smoker were outside feeding their cravings. You can make the same argument for parents and non-parents; or parents of a single child versus those who have been blessed with what feels like an entire soccer team.

There must be fairness. If there isn’t, the cohesion that is so vital for team work begins to erode through the acid of resentment. There must be respect: For the whole person to be welcome, the whole of every person in the team must be welcome, which means that by definition the whole of those wholes has to be toned down so that everyone one can actually hear themselves speak and have space to get on with their work.

For every right we have, there is an equal and opposite obligation; if we have the right to believe or behave (within reason) with the freedom we believe we are entitled to, we must afford that same right to our colleagues. It’s called tolerance and the greatest irony is that those who shout the loudest for it are often the most intolerant.

It’s like asking for time to find yourself (I know, I still can’t believe it either, but it happened at a company I was consulting to last year). The person(s) who place this expectation on their line managers and the company C-suite, might not be as empathetic if the company turned around on the 25th of the month, shrugged their shoulders and explained that they needed time to find the money to pay the salaries.

The mantra for 2025 is simple, people are vital to the success of any organisation,  but individuals can be a liability. As a business leader you need to have people who share the vision and understand their roles as individual members of the team to contribute to that whole. None of us, especially not smaller businesses, can afford to have individuals that need to be micro-managed and pulled along all the time, because we are running a company not a creche.

And that’s perhaps the essence of the entire argument, if you want to be remunerated and rewarded as an adult in 2025 then you must behave like one, accepting all the attendant responsibilities and obligations. When that becomes the shared space in an enabling environment then we all win, all the time. 

Let’s strive for that this year.

* Lucia Mabasa is Chief Executive Officer of pinpoint one human resources, a proudly South African black women owned executive search firm. pinpoint one human resources provides executive search solutions in the demand for C suite, specialist and critical skills across industries and functional disciplines, in South Africa and across Africa. Visit www.pinpointone.co.za to find out more or read her previous columns on leadership; avoiding the pitfalls of the boardroom and becoming the best C-suite executive you can be.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.