There is no “they”!

Several years ago, I had a great boss who said “quit saying they, there is no they”.  It was some of the best advice I’d ever gotten.  I had this problem at the time where I blamed “they” for things that were not going right for me.  For example, I would say “they won’t let us” or “they just don’t care”.  THEY!

I have been in conversations with many people over the years that talk about the infamous “they”.  The fact of the matter is that whatever your rank is you are the “they” you refer to.  In reality, there is no they, and that is especially true if you are in management because if you are, then YOU are THEY.

Just do it!
Whenever you are faced with making a decision, make it.  If you do the next right thing, whatever that happens to be, you are most assuredly not going to get into trouble. There is an old management saying that goes ” it is better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.”  What that means is that if you are faced with something that needs to be done, just do it.   I have seen people stand around for hours waiting to be told what to do, when they already knew what the right thing was.  But “they” weren’t around to tell them what to do.

I was in the Navy as I told you in an earlier post, so maybe some of this “just do it” attitude comes from that.

But, I can assure you that if was shooting at you, not too many military people would wait for “they” to tell them to shoot back. Nope, we are shooting with all barrels blazing to save our skins. That is the same attitude you need to have in business. No, I didn’t mean you should shoot someone, but I do mean you should always take the initiative to get things moving.

Many years ago I worked in a medical lab where we did research for a drug company. The research team was led by a physician who never wanted to write up the lab procedure for us, so we always had to wait for him to arrive before we could start.

Well, I hated that, and one day I decided to take a chance and set up the procedure as if I knew what he wanted. My colleagues were both scared and annoyed at my assertiveness. When the physician arrived he looked around and said “its about damn time someone took some initiative around here.”

Ha!!!

So my advice to you is this. Drop “they” from your vocabulary and change it to “we”. This way the next time someone says “they don’t care about us”, you can say, “yes we do”.

Try it.

Hope this helps!!

Email your questions and comments to mike.anderson@directyourcareer.com . I will answer every one.

http://www.directyourcareer.com/