In case you haven’t noticed yet, the way you react to the small group of employees who are unsatisfactory influences the behavior of most of the rest of them.
This is why it’s vitally important your attitudes and behaviors are always consistent with your stated values.
For instance, on average, 20 percent of your people will never steal anything, while another 20 percent will look for every opportunity to rip you off – be it a pen or money from the till.
The largest group — the 60 percent who fall into middle — could go either way and will choose their behaviors based on how you deal with the miscreants.
If you let things slide for the ones taking advantage of you, that 60 percent in the middle will see it as an invitation to mimic those bad behaviors.
This was originally published on Mel Kleiman’s Humetrics blog.