The American View: The Cost of Putting the Wrong People in Power

Instead, Eduardo groused, this place is already a shambling corpse and it hasn’t even been open six months yet. I asked if the problem was from lack of advertising, bad location, poor food quality, mercurial consumer tastes, touch competition, or some other expected factor. Eduardo sighed in exasperation and said, “No. Embezzlement.” 

As he explained it, this family member has always been an irresponsible fellow. The man talks a good game and can perform well when closely supervised but will inevitably foul up when he’s given the freedom to run his own life. The man’s personal history sheds some light into how he got this way, but the details aren’t important for our purposes. As Eduardo explained it, he had hoped that this relative would defy history and come through on this venture … but he wasn’t optimistic. 
The restaurant opened and early reports celebrated that it was turning a profit. Business was good! The investors all celebrated. The good times wouldn’t last, though. 

Had the restaurant staff simply kept at it responsibly it’s highly likely they could have made a go of it. Unfortunately for the dedicated and talented staff, the owner was still a scumbag at heart. Eduardo revealed that he learned early on that the boss had been emptying the restaurant’s bank account so he could piss all their revenue away at the casinos. Like so many habitual liars before him, the boss was treating the business like his own personal piggy bank. 

After a few months, this practise left him unable to pay his staff. After a few weeks of promising that the finances would be straightened out, all of his employees quit. They had bills to pay and weren’t keen on working for empty promises. Can’t blame them for that. Honestly, I’m surprised that none of them took their tools home with them as partial payment. 

What do you do with an unstaffed restaurant? “Hire” his pals to fill in, of course. That only lasted a week or two, since the boss didn’t pay them either. While all that was going on, he took out a risky bank loan, purportedly to fund advertising … but, of course, just burned all that cash up at the casinos. 

 Now, Eduardo groused, the restaurant is effectively dead. You can’t buy ingredients without money and, even if you could, you can’t cook those ingredients or serve the final product to customers without people … who also cost money. The scam might have worked if the owner was running a single person food cart; it wouldn’t fly in a sit-down establishment. Bankruptcy is only days away, Eduardo said, and investor lawsuits might well come next. 

The reason I’m sharing this depressing anecdote is that it illustrates how some people simply cannot be trusted serve in a leadership position not matter how well qualified they seem. They can have all the training, mentoring, and experience needed to perform the work, but their character flaws will always ruin the opportunity. Whether those flaws take the form of arrogance, entitlement, delusions, spite, or any combination thereof, it’s the person’s unmitigated flaws that play the role of inescapable fate. You cannot expect loyalty from a demonstrated disloyal person any more than you can expect honesty from a pathologically dishonest person. Leopards, spots, etc.

I’m confident that this young man will blame everyone in the world but himself: It was the unreliable suppliers’ fault! It was the greedy financiers! It was our jealous rival across the street poisoning our Yelp! Reviews! It was crappy delivery drivers! It was the Illuminati cutting a deal with Sonic the Hedgehog! It was anything but the pathetic truth that the guy in charge couldn’t control himself and stole all the business’s revenue. Nope. Couldn’t be that …

My guess is the man will never own up to it. He’ll go to his grave insisting that his contributions to his business’s failure were inconsequential. In between now and then, he’ll keep on defrauding people and swearing that he isn’t responsible when each venture goes down in flames. I’ve worked with these people in all sorts of roles and they rarely ever turn over a new leaf.

Honestly, it sounds like this man needs serious mental health support and possible a court-appointed guardian or something. I’m not trying to infantilize him; if he wants to ruin his own life, that’s his right as an American. Besides, it’s not like he did something truly evil, like committing murder or graduating law school. That said, he’s demonstrated that he can never be trusted with money. The whys don’t really matter at this point. Take it as fact and plan accordingly.  

Based on that, I argue, this man should never again be placed in a leadership position. He’s proven that he can’t or won’t control his self-destructive urges. He’s not alone in that respect. A terrifying percentage of adults share similar faults. How they got way is, to my mind, irrelevant. I’m sure each person’s story is nuanced and compelling. What matters – in the business world, at least – is that these people have conclusively demonstrated why they should not be given unchecked power. They’ve proven that they will, if given an opportunity, rationalise misusing their remit for personal reasons. 

I appreciate that this might be an unpopular opinion. Contemporary HR types will likely gasp in horror at the idea that every fungible meat-based labour unit isn’t interchangeable. That’s fine … I’m not interested in debating abstract theory, especially with people who make decisions based on fantasies. From a strictly pragmatic standpoint, I contend that a worker who has demonstrated that they cannot be trusted should be prohibited from ever gaining unmanaged control over people, processes, or resources, full stop. 

Sure, I believe that you should attempt to rehabilitate such people if you have the time and can afford to absorb their inevitable failures along the way. Rehabilitation is a noble and admirable endeavour. By all means, attempt it … when you can afford to. That said, day-to-day management demands leaders that can be trusted. It’s a damned sin to force your workers to suffer under a corrupt boss. And the first step to preventing this morale-killing problem is acknowledging that not everyone is leadership material.