I have spoken to many employees who have taken their positions for granted. And not surprisingly, they have taken their employers for granted, too.

This disrespect can be very costly. One employee had an $80,000 computer related position. He had been employed for three years in a privately held sheet metal job shop employing about 100 people. He showed up late for work an average of two times per week.

The owner of this business was, on the surface, a super nice guy who seemed completely unflappable but underneath he had ambivalent feelings, just like anybody else. After about five or six months of observing this tardy behavior, the owner was actually seething mad. He hadn’t said anything to this employee, but he was reaching a boiling point. He asked me to counsel this employee because he thought if he did it himself, he would end up terminating the person. He was that mad.

You might accuse this business owner of being avoidance oriented, confrontation averse and just plain wimpy. You might even be right. I think that there is great value in having an outside person address these matters, perhaps because I’m a consultant who manages messes for my clients. But the less personal the counseling is, the better it is. By having the supervisor conduct the counseling, the greater the tendency there is for overreaction and the greater the probability for lingering animosity, both ways.

I met with the person and asked him to explain his habitual tardiness. He told me that his wife had a job and needed to be at work on time consistently. She also drove a car that was undependable. Regularly, he was called upon to take her to work, which caused him to be late. He told me that since he did not have a fixed and firm start time, he could take the liberty of driving his wife to work as needed.

I asked him why he thought he did not have a fixed and firm start time in his job. He gave me an incredulous look and said his boss, the owner of the company, never told him that he had a specific time he was required to report to work. I proceeded to tell him that his work ethic and his presumption were putting his job at risk. He had no idea!

I suggested he look at his job in a little different way. I have a prop that I use in similar counseling situations. It is an old violin. I actually acquired this violin and then ran over it with my granddaughter’s bicycle. I take this smashed violin out of its case and hand it to the people I’m counseling. I ask them to tell me what it is that they’re holding. They look at me rather stupefied and advise that it’s a smashed up violin. I usually say, “What if I told you that you were holding an original 1690 Stradivarius violin?” I go on to say that in its current condition, it still worth in excess of $1 million. Then I say that if it were restored, it would be worth over $10 million. The response is always the same; they take a gulp of air, their eyes get big and they hand it back to me very, very carefully. I assure them that it’s not a Stradivarius, and it’s really just as they guessed—a smashed up violin.

I explain that their job is really a Stradivarius. Some days it may look like a smashed up fiddle and even feel like one, but every day it’s really a Stradivarius. Without the job, almost nothing works in peoples’ lives. This employee was treating his job like a busted fiddle, and I told him that if he didn’t start treating it like a Stradivarius, he was going to lose it.

I encourage everyone to consider his or her job like a Stradivarius.