Don't "Phillips" Your Employees

The Nazis used concentration camp labor to assemble airplanes. They encountered a problem, people on low-calorie diets could not manage the complicated electronic assembly. The German people being pragmatic, gave them more food so they could do the job. 

Many of the detainees doing the labor were also German, they were pragmatic too.  They recognized in building fighters they were helping their captors, so after being at the job  for about  three months they begin to sabotage their work.  The Nazis, being suspicious and contemptuous of the people they had  enslaved for the purposes of extermination, assumed sabotage was inevitable. Being  zealots they had a plan to deal with  the insurrection. After 6 months on the line, a new group of concentration camp workers were brought into a training program, given higher calorie meals and put to work making airplanes.

The fat, dumb and happy folks who are sabotaging the Luftwaffe were sent back to the camp and had to live on campus food. Six months after returning to the camp, they were recalled to the factory, given better rations and allowed to resume their jobs because the replacement workers were being naughty and sabotaging ME 109s.

When the original workers started to sabotage again, they were returned to the camps. This time they were put on reduced rations, even by camp standards,  and worked to their death.

The problem with working for narcissists is doing both your job and paying unending respect to “The Chosen One”. Insecure egocentric “leaders” measure both production and devotion, calling devotion “loyalty”. The problem is when insecurity  lays siege to the ego, ego acts out in unpredictable and exploitive ways. Loyalists are sacrificed. Fear and terror to come the ham and eggs of an infinite breakfast buffet.

A career should offer challenges and rewards. A career should offer a chance to use your skills, gifts and talents as a way to express yourself as a professional and human. Businesses failing to meet this standard are doomed to a spiral of reduced sales and loss of key personal.

The tragic part is many of the workers trapped in this form of dysfunction are seduced by the “loyalty” of The Dear Leader. They work harder, on increasingly reduced rations until the day it comes to a screeching halt.

 The good news is in every massacre there are survivors.  People who escape manipulation and are freed to work for themselves are among the most productive, grateful and successful people in the world.