Unless you’re a total sniveling suck-up, chances are you’ve been told you have a ‘bad attitude’ at work once or twice in your career. This is a concept most people seem to forget: ‘attitude’ is not a fixed characteristic, and henceforth ‘bad attitude’ cannot be either. Let’s do a quick example here: you can be a totally jolly person. So, in that case, you have a ‘good attitude.’ Then someone cuts you off in traffic. You go nuts. In this case, you have a ‘bad attitude.’ You’re still the same person, but your attitude fluctuates contextually by situation. In other words, you’re normal.
I’ve written about this probably 93,178 times, but here’s the basic deal with work. We want it to be a logical place. That’s why we love us some process. However, work is populated by human beings. As a result of that fact, work is an emotional place. We often remove emotion and psychology from discussions about work in the name of ‘professionalism,’ which is both comical and infuriating in equal measure.
This is the bad attitude myth in a nutshell, but we’ll dive a little deeper.
The bad attitude myth and the bad employee myth
I’m about to blow your mind, so get ready.
I don’t actually think there is such a thing as a “bad employee.”
