Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Once you refer to some person as “boss” and other persons as “employees,” all is lost.

I saw this post a few days back about the boss’ greatest fear. They don’t want the employees to catch them on video. There might be something in the video that can harm them.

Let’s back up a few steps. I think the boss’ greatest fear should be:

Some persons are called “boss” while other persons are called “employees.”

I worked in the U.S. Federal government for over 25 years. I attended countless gatherings where we discussed supervisors and employees. I was always confused about this because it seemed to me that supervisors were also employees. I mean, they were paid by the same taxpayers and worked for the same U.S. government. How did they stop being “employees?” These “supervisors” were supervised by someone else. In fact, everyone in the Federal government has an official supervisor except the President.

Still, people insisted on separating everyone into two groups: supervisors and employees. These people insisted on pitting these two groups against one another.

That is what I see as the problem with this boss and employee thing:

It creates two embattled groups.

Whatever happened to, “we are all in this together” and “we all have one mission” and those things? Were they just a bunch of silly sayings from and for naive persons like me?

Take care with the language we use at work. Are we all working together or not?