Here’s a dirty little secret: No matter what you’re told, no matter what words you hear about loyalty and family and teams, your company does not care about you. Oh, no. Not a bit. Sure, your supervisor may be a great person, who values your work, looks out for you in the corporate jungle, advocates on your behalf, maybe even takes a personal interest in your life and family. Your boss may pay you well, give you good raises and bonuses, nurture your career, give you guidance and mentorship and look after you in innumerable ways. Your company may have a fantastic CEO who prioritizes employees. All of them will tell you how important you are to them and how much the company values you.
It’s a pack of lies.
What your company cares about is your work product. When it tells you that you’re valuable to the company, it’s telling you that what you do for the company is of value, and it wants your efforts to continue. If your boss nurtures your career, it’s because there’s benefit and utility in doing so. If your company offers training, profit-sharing, bonuses, team-building, and “corporate cultural” activities, it’s doing so because it believes that the work product of its employees will improve. Certainly, individuals can become friends at work, even bosses and subordinates. Certainly, some of those friendships can and do transcend the job and place of employment. In that transcendence is the reality – your boss is not your company, and your company is not your boss. If your boss quits or retires, the company continues to exist. If the CEO changes, the company continues to exist.
Still don’t believe me? Contemplate what would happen if you stopped being productive. Imagine if you developed a drinking problem and it started affecting your work. Initially, there would be concerns. Then there would be conversations. Then there would be meetings, reports, entries in your HR records. If your job lasted through a review and raise/bonus period, your decrease in productivity would be reflected. Your supervisor or his boss might try to be a friend, or you might be encouraged to get help, but don’t forget that the company has an interest in your continued productivity. The motivation for helping you is rooted in that productivity, and in the fact that there is a cost in replacing you and a lag time in bringing your replacement up to speed. But, if the efforts to get you turned around fail, you will be fired and forgotten about. Even those who are truly friends in the work place have a conflicting loyalty, and it’s rare that a supervisor or boss will willingly sacrifice himself, his career or his company to help and protect you.
Contrast that with your family’s or your friends’ motivations under similar circumstances. While families and friends can and will eventually cut ties with people who develop stubborn problems or who are problems, they will generally look to help first. That help comes from love and friendship for the person, not for what the person does for them. Your family and friends are loyal to you because of who you are, and will help you if you stumble because they care about you.
Why, then, do so many of us feel loyalty to the companies we work for? Why allow those companies to inculcate us with allegiance to our employers? That allegiance so often works against us. Employers know it and rely on it. If we’re loyal, if we’re reluctant to change jobs out of loyalty, they can get away with paying us less and working us more. If we’re loyal, we’ll tolerate unpleasant or unsatisfactory conditions longer, we’ll tolerate slower or non-responses to our complaints, we’ll put up with more, we won’t leave for better pay or better conditions.
This tendency towards loyalty for “our” company is likely due, in part, to an anthropomorphizing and personalizing of that company. It doesn’t seem unnatural to conflate the person we work for with the company we work for when things are good in both relationships, and to disassociate the two when one is good and the other isn’t. Many have had lousy bosses in good companies or good bosses in lousy companies, and the good one can often serve as an excuse for the lousy one, and there can be a tendency to believe that the company can be better if only the lousy supervisor or boss goes away. While a new supervisor or new boss can make a bad situation better, or even effect a total turnaround, the hope or anticipation of that should be framed selfishly rather than out of loyalty to what once was and might be again.
Your loyalty should be, first and foremost, to yourself. When and where exhibitions of company loyalty advance your life goals, by all means exhibit them. Be the go-to person. Be the team player. Talk the company talk. Show them you’re part of the family.
But, when and where loyalty to your company works contrary to your goals, your career, your future, your happiness and well-being, recognize and accept it, realize whatever loyalty the company professes to have to you is either ephemeral or false, and act in your own best interests. Oftentimes, your best interests and those of your employer conflate, but not always. When they don’t, don’t expect your boss to subordinate the company’s best interests to yours. He won’t and he shouldn’t. You shouldn’t either.
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