According to a recent press release by the Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM) the top ten bad behaviours witnessed in the workplace were:

• Cutting corners – 72%
• Lying to hide your mistakes – 72%
• Badmouthing colleagues – 68%
• Passing the buck (when you don’t get your work done) – 67%
• Slacking off when no one’s watching – 64%
• Lying to hide other people’s mistakes – 63%
• Taking credit for other people’s work – 57%
• Taking a sickie – 56%
• Lying about skills and experience – 54%
• Taking low value items from work – 52%

This is an extremely worrying set of statistics and despite the source being a press release is very likely to be true.

It’s clear from this that successive governments and do-gooders have been pushing the education agenda too far. If you start telling the workers that they are equal in stature and status to their managers they start getting ideas well above their station and start behaving like one.

These so called ‘bad’ behaviours are the cornerstone of our Mediocre Management culture, a set of carefully honed skills that take years to perfect, requiring practice and effort to ensure they are never spotted and the manager never caught out.

Enabling the staff (sorry, ‘colleagues’), students, interns (!) and Doris the tea lady to get above their station in life and ‘cut corners’ or ‘’pass the buck’ is manifestly unacceptable behaviour and must be stopped or the rot will soon set in. Before we know it there will workers on the Board, the pay gap between them and us will shrink and we may even see a need for accountability for management decisions. This needs to be stopped!

Now in the good old days you could take one or two out and flog them as an example to the others but not today, you can’t even fire someone without 20 warnings and HR crawling all over your back so you’ll need to keep your retribution legal and above board.

My suggestions are:

• An outdoors bonding weekend in February involving a river, a build-your -own raft and 7.00am starts
• Compulsory team meetings every Friday at 5pm
• A Bush tucker trial where employees have to eat insects or work unpaid overtime
• Promote the most disliked member of staff to a supervisory role over the most rebellious department

If none of this works, then fall back to the tried and trusted method of a long-winded re-organisation. Set impossible targets and create a host of ‘challenges’ to be overcome with a gentle hint that winners keep their jobs.

Remember Mediocrity must prevail!