Rogue Employees or Mushrooms?

So why do they go rogue? 

Every company gets them – rogue employees. 

These are the people who seem to do their own thing, despite that not being the way everyone else does things. And despite being told what they should or shouldn’t do. 

These are the people who make up their own hours, their own reporting structure, their own methodologies for tasks. And if they were creating revenue, bringing amazing ideas to the party, or finding better ways of doing things that would be great. 

But they are not. They are frankly being a bit of a pain, causing upset among colleagues and creating more work, worry, and longer hours for their employer.

Well, it generally isn’t because they are psychopaths who want to ruin your life as the leader (although it can feel like that sometimes). 

It could well be because you are guilty of Mushroom Management. And you know that only works for mushrooms, don’t you? 

If you haven’t heard of mushroom management before, let me explain.

We are going to call your rogue employee Alex.

Now Alex goes around most of the time feeling confused and slightly angry. 

In his mind, he is doing a great job and he knows his onions!

But no one seems to notice, or care!

He is ignored quite a lot of the time and he feels unheard and is pretty fed up.

So, to make things more interesting he plays the fool, tries new stuff, puts his oar in and generally likes to "make things more interesting".

However, it doesn't feel good for anyone else (and probably not him).

In most cases, it will be because he is a mushroom.

No one has told Alex what the bigger picture is. No one has shared the plan and the vision with him – which means that when he comes up with a great idea (in his/her/their mind), he doesn’t understand why no one else thinks the idea is great.

Now here’s the thing with employees. If you don’t communicate well enough, if they don’t know what is going on – then they will fill in the gaps with their own thoughts, ideas, solutions. And that could just be a big waste of everyone’s time. 

The employee is spending time on something they think is a good idea, not realising it won’t work because it doesn’t fall in line with the company vision. The manager gets frustrated because the employee is going off down their own path and not doing the stuff that would actually be useful. 

Everyone’s unhappy.

So instead of that – let your people know what the vision is and the plan of how you are all going to get to the vision. Let them know where you want their input and ideas, but framed by the bigger picture, so that their ideas are aligned with that. 

And, don’t make the mistake of thinking this is a one-time deal. You can just share that info once and that will be fine. That is not how this works. It needs to be a constant part of the business conversation, today, tomorrow, next week, the week after. 

And if that sounds a bit like hard work, then I have a short live video I just created explaining it, and a cheat sheet that goes along with it.

Here's the video link and the cheat sheet is with it.

Please do connect with me if we are not already connected and if you want to bypass all of this and just have a chat about how I can help then message me and we'll get straight on it.

Julie