It is a fact, just as there are organizations that learn, there are organizations that kill. It is a rough and unscientific term, but it offers the reader a direct, uncensored version of what some companies are capable of doing, administratively speaking.
Companies are not entities alien to life and society, on the contrary, they compose and develop it in many ways because without them communities would live in constant monotony and plunged into underdevelopment.
In recent years, companies have gone from being profit and comfort centers for their owners and proxies (in traditional thinking) to embracing a concept of social responsibility that reaches the family, therefore the term "learning companies" did not sound strange. to the administrative reality, it has been understood that people are the company and therefore, to the extent that people learn this as a whole, they also do it.
But there are organizations where none of these contemporary truths have penetrated, even in the most basic and elemental sense, companies where work is a requirement and not a sign of identification, where it is intended to hire talent not to add value but to Perform a task in the style of indirect slavery.
Those are the companies that kill.
However, there is an imperative need to broaden the concept of these companies, since it is not a matter of physical death, as it is obvious to note, but rather of key elements for a successful administration.
They are called “companies that kill” because they scuttle, through the use of their particular style, all the accumulated experience of the professionals they capture, making them appear clumsy and ignorant, even though their operations and results leave much to be desired.
Among other things, these companies:
- They kill initiative and creativity: They disapprove of any proposal, idea or suggestion made to change, improve or re-engineer a process. They ignore the explanations and confine themselves to stating that this is the way they work in that company, thus ending the conversation. They kill identification: They openly and directly expose mistreatment to their own and strangers, they show little respect for people and their staff, even when quality is their watchword. They kill dreams and expectations: They hinder the personal and professional development of the individual, not directly, they assign long-term goals that are juxtaposed with those that their staff has originally established, based on the elements of hiring, thus drowning the desire for growth and improvement that they generated. They kill teamwork: They maintain a constant subdivision of staff, making and motivating negative or alert comments regarding one area of the other, thus fueling mistrust and disinterest among members of the same company. They kill communication: They question, reprimand, and even threaten their staff regarding the handling of communication, preventing professional correspondence exchange and doubting its usefulness.They kill availability: They demand unnecessary sacrifices from their workers, days that exceed twelve hours a day, seven days a week, depriving their staff of social life and rest. They kill planning: They give everyone the same level of priority, demanding the same deadlines to respond to different requirements, regardless of the level of dedication that each one has. They kill motivation: By treating employees as mere pawns on a chessboard, without valuing their skills, potentials and abilities, these companies destroy the ties that unite people with their activity and with it the motivation that the individual brought with him..
As has already been pointed out in the past, organizations are not different entities than the people that make it up, so all these dishonest practices are the work of the culture and values of those responsible for managing them, making it almost impossible to generate a true change of attitude, since it must come from the inside out, and this is particularly difficult.
But not all "companies that kill" are easy to recognize, they have an attractive and long-lasting facade that attracts good profiles, people with valuable ideas, willing to give their best and with considerable experience, but whose time in these organizations is short and fruitless, because the very nature of the company prevents its development and use of its skills.
Here are the most common characteristics of companies that kill:
- They are usually organizations with a long history or that have made themselves known in their market in a short time. Although they have different levels of supervision, the responsibility rests exclusively with one or two people who are the only ones who can make decisions. They give the impression of They are prosperous or organized because they usually have pleasant environments or high technology, although it is not necessarily a differentiating element. Their selection processes are at the extremes: Either they are very fast, which prevents them from costing correctly, or they are too slow, preventing Likewise, appropriately establish the level of expectations. They take advantage of the need for stability, income or expressions of their personnel to subject them to unusual pressures, schedules and demands. They almost always have a high turnover rate at all levels,accompanied by elaborate and even implausible explanations of the reasons that motivated the employee's departure (voluntary or not).
It is important to note that the passage through this type of organization is not entirely traumatic for the professionals who experience it, they offer the opportunity to know the type of administration that must be eradicated from the contemporary world and confront them with all the elements that originated true revolutions. in managerial thinking, the same ones that allow today to differentiate this type of companies from those that truly deserve to be recognized.
