Mushroom Employees
The Amplified Impact Podcast
October 23rd, 2023
I recently came across the term “mushroom employees.”
It’s a not-so-great approach where you keep your team in the dark and don’t provide the nourishment they need to grow.
In the past, when working for others, I often felt like a mushroom employee…no idea about the big picture and stuck with less-than-ideal tasks.
The result? Poor work and eventually wanting to leave.
Good leadership means offering a vision where your team’s aspirations fit.
Even if they don’t want to start a business, they have dreams like making more money or taking on more significant roles.
It’s your job to help them achieve those dreams. Make sure they have the resources, training, and support they need.
Fix what’s missing before concluding they can’t meet your standards.
Avoid creating mushroom employees. Keep your team in the light, provide resources, and support their growth.
A fulfilled team is more likely to help you reach your goals.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“In order to create a thriving team, you must keep your employees in the light, provide them with transparency, and give them a clear vision for what you’re trying to accomplish.”
– Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
Yo, what’s up, everybody? If you are managing a team, if you are, you know, a founder and you have a team that you’re work that was working alongside of you, or you’re a manager within a business, I want to share this, this term I heard recently, which I think is really, really on the nose and a really interesting thing to think about. It’s called mushroom employees. And maybe you’ve heard about this before. I had never heard about it, but I had an employee bring this up, which was a Mushroom employee is somebody who is kept in the dark and fed shit. And when I was told this, I was like, man, that explains so much of how I felt back when I was working for other people, is that I often felt like I was being kept in the dark. I had no idea what was going on, the big overarching plan, and I was constantly being fed shit, which meant I was being given the shit jobs. I wasn’t giving enough time or resources to be able to do the jobs well. I wasn’t getting clarity on why it was important or anything like that.
Anthony Vicino:
And the result then is if you keep your employees in the dark and you feed them shit, they’re not going to, one, do their best work, and two, they’re eventually going to leave. They’re going to go find people who will keep them in the light and that will help them grow and not just be a fungus because nobody wants to be that right. I heard recently from somebody else who was this? I think this is Dan Martel. He’s talking about how your job as a leader within the organization, the company, as the founder, is to have a dream big enough or a vision big enough that the dreams of everybody underneath of you can fit within it. So let me repeat that. You need to have a vision big enough that all the dreams of the people underneath of you can fit within it. And so maybe you have your marketing director, your office manager. These people who they don’t want to go be entrepreneurs, they don’t want to start a business, but they do have ambitions, and they do have things that they want for their life.
Anthony Vicino:
They want to make more money. They want to have more responsibility. They want to take on cooler and more complex projects. They want all these things. They have all these dreams for their life and for their career. And if you’re not giving them the room to breathe and to grow and the vision that says, hey, there’s space within this company for you to spread your wings and fly, then you’re going to lose those people. They’re going to leave you and go find the entrepreneurs, the founders that can provide that for them. And this is really hard, I think in the early days of building a business, when you are just getting to that first level of profitability and you’re starting to make your first couple of hires and that’s a very scary time.
Anthony Vicino:
And I think the mistake that a lot of us make in the beginning is we hire the cheapest person we can possibly afford and we think like, oh, I’ll buy the 40, we don’t buy humans. I’ll pay 40,000 for an executive assistant and that’ll be good enough for now. Whereas when you pay 40,000, you probably don’t have a big vision or dream in mind for that person within the company. They’re really just doing the bare minimum and the basics. And because you have invested so little into them in the grand schemes, it’s unlikely that you’re going to put the work and energy and the resources into them to help them get to that next level of like 60, 7100, 200,000, or whatever it is that they’re aiming for within the company. But when you start hiring initially and you start thinking bigger about what is this thing that you’re trying to create and is it going to be a machine big enough to support the team? Then you start to come. At it from a little bit of a different perspective, a different angle. Which is? Okay, maybe instead of hiring the cheapest person we can afford, who’s the most expensive person? What would it be like instead of the 40,000 executive assistant, the 100,000, to come right out of the gates with that role? Because in my experience, at least, you get what you pay for in life.
Anthony Vicino:
When you buy the cheap product, you end up paying twice, you pay for it once and then you pay with regret when it breaks and then you got to pay a third time to replace it. But when you spend that money initially to buy the high quality things straight out the gate, then you only have to pay that big price tag once. And in the grand scheme, like in the end result, it ends up being cheaper. And I think the same thing with employees. And when it comes to employees, you really want to get the best people you could possibly afford and then you want to keep them in the light. You want to keep them in the know transparency, and you want to give them a clear vision for what you’re trying to accomplish. And instead of micromanaging them and looking over their shoulder, you give them the objective. You make it clear why it’s important and what you expect in terms of the end result.
Anthony Vicino:
And then you let them run through those open pastures to solve it for themselves. Because you do not hire dogs to teach them how to bark. You hired these great people so that they can go and be great. Now make sure that you’re supporting them and giving them the resources that they need to be able to do that. A lot of times when we have employees that are not living up to our expectations. And this happens all the time, especially when you’re first starting off with hiring. One of the big mistakes I made in the beginning was I would bring people into the organization. I wouldn’t give them enough onboarding, enough training, enough insight about what to do, how to do it, and why it was important.
Anthony Vicino:
And so they would fail to live up to my expectations. They would do the thing at a lower standard than I was expecting, they would do it slower. And I would get frustrated because I wasn’t good at training and holding people accountable and setting expectations or anything of this type. I would just fire them and then I would take back the job and I would do it myself. And that’s no way to grow. That’s just going to burn you out in the long term. And a framework that I found really, really helpful when evaluating, okay, is the problem with me or is it with the employee? Because a lot of times in the beginning I had so much hubris and ego and said, oh, when I do it, the system’s fine, it’s easy, I can pump it out in this time period and then get this quality, therefore, why can’t you, right? So I was holding people to a standard that was maybe unrealistic because I had been doing it for however long, and I was like the expert at it. And so instead of holding people to that standard, the question that I started to ask, the framework that I would go through is, are they slacking or are they lacking? And before you ever assume that somebody’s slacking, it’s very important that you go through and make sure that they’re not lacking.
Anthony Vicino:
And when they lack something, it’s a lack of resources, training, support from you. You didn’t give them something, they’re lacking the necessary resources to do the job exceptionally well. And so when you get to this point of people not living up to your expectations and your standards, start by asking, what have I not given them? And you need to go through a couple of rounds of this usually and say, okay, you didn’t have this insight, you didn’t have this expectation. Okay, you didn’t have this training, you didn’t have this accountability, whatever. And it can take a little bit of time before you finally check all the boxes and you’re able to say, okay, you’re not lacking anymore. I gave you all the resources, everything that you could possibly need to be able to do this, and it’s still not living up to my standards and my expectations. Well, then you might actually have a slacking problem, which is they’re just not doing the job and that maybe it’s time to move them to a different seat or move them out of the company entirely. But I found that framework slack or lack very, very helpful for helping me understand that any employee that is failing at their job.
Anthony Vicino:
It is more a reflection of me than it is of them. And that if I can start by fixing what I have failed to do in that equation, there’s a high likelihood that they can still succeed and win, which is ultimately the goal for everybody. And I think probably in the past endeavors, I have been guilty of having mushroom employees where I kept them in the dark. I fed them shit, and so I wanted to bring this to you guys so you don’t make my same mistakes. If you’re out there hiring and you’re bringing people onto your team, you don’t want a team of mushrooms. So keep them in the light. I don’t know, maybe they’re hydrangeas or something like that. My palm tree.
Anthony Vicino:
Anywho, that’s going to do it for me, guys. Hopefully this brings you a little bit of value. If it did, do me a favor. Just drop a review. Shoot this to somebody that you think would get some value out of it. If you got a boss who’s treating you like a mushroom right now, send this to them and say, hey, not cool or whatever, but I appreciate you guys. I’ll catch you guys back around these parts tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.
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