Loyalty is reserved for performance

I suspect for many of you younger people today, most of you do not believe in company loyalty or being loyal to a company for any prolonged period of time.

Something I want to open as a topic of discussion is the idea that loyalty is reserved for performance. That a company can be loyal to an employee, and vice versa, but that it is an exchange for exceptional performance.

A track record of success, where the employee has proven that they will put their own agenda aside on behalf of what the company wants to pursue, is also a strong predictor of whether loyalty is something that the company will express.

How closely do your goals have affinity with that of the organization as a whole? How aggressively do you help make those things happen? The ability to take the future that the company is looking to manifest in terms of pursuing its mission, and drag that future into the present moment, without having to be pushed or prodded or encouraged or incentivized to do so, also contributes to whether a company will show loyalty to someone.

I mean, how does anyone actually think this works? A company isn’t going to be loyal to you just for showing up and doing the average amount of work. It’s gonna be loyal to you when you treat the company as if it were your own. And if you’re performing at an exceptional level, where you treat the company as if it’s your own, and the company still has the means to render rewards to you, it will. There’s no reason for it not to.

This enters an entirely different realm of how you might look at your career at a company. If you think of your career as a job where you have a 9 to 5, and you can’t wait to get out of it and go home and do the things you really care about, you’re not in the performance bracket that I’m speaking of in this article.

Likewise, and this is going to be controversial, if you prioritize your family life and your friends over the company, you are not in the performance bracket that I am speaking about.

It’s important now for me to say that I don’t think you need to make this choice: You can and probably should prioritize your family and your friends and your own mental well-being over your work. All I’m saying is that if you are looking for company loyalty based on performance, you will not find yourself in this bracket if you have other priorities.

What are the rewards of a company being loyal to its employee? The company will act in your interest in order to try to keep you, as you are a keystone part of its success.

Now, it’s also important to note that sometimes the company may not have the resources to reward you in the way that you wish that it did, and that is a personal reflection that you need to have about whether you are in the right company or not, for the level of contribution you are giving. It’s also possible that for some reason or another, the mission itself is compromised, and the new mission is to survive vs. thrive, and this may mean that the company cannot do what it wishes it could do in terms of loyalty. However, in most cases, the company will do whatever it can do in order to keep you satisfied and delivering at well-above-average rates on behalf of the mission.

A company being loyal to its employees, and employees being loyal to the company, is not dead. It’s just that loyalty is reserved for above-average or even fantastical performance over time, with a proven track record to put the company before yourself.

This message is really intended for those of you who do see the grind of your career track as being where you want to place your energy and efforts. It’s not targeted towards people who have a more balanced view of their life, who have a more healthy work-life balance in their goals, or people who are pursuing a family. It is a message targeting people who decide, for one reason or another, that they want to have one focus: the company and its mission.