Striving for mediocrity.

Years ago I had a GM (general manager, responsible for the club and the managers) named JW.  He said that he managed on the pigeon style of management; he would swoop in and crap on everybody.  He didn't really but he definitely was a "the sky is falling" kind of guy.  That's if one little thing went wrong he was talking about the club numbers going down in flames.  If the place was rocking he was telling us managers that we were "phenomenal, phenomenal I tell you!".  Some times those "pep talks" would be in the same day.
No matter how crazy he was (a bottle of Coors Light in one hand and a chainsaw in the other kind of crazy; yes, I saw that) he wanted you to stand out.  Our office was tiny in that club, he would do a lot of official GM type business in the parking lot.  I stole a trick from him, if you bitch at someone do it in private.  If you want to praise someone, sometimes do it in public and sometimes in private.  In the first year I worked with him he took me outside four times, once to kick me in the butt for being mediocre and three times to tell me about a raise I received.

JW was a real big believer in personal accountability.  If you screw up, own up to it and learn from it.  If you do well then YOU should be rewarded for it.  At these clubs the bartenders would pool their tips, he hated that.  On weekends we would have three bartenders; bar one would handle the customers, bar two would be split with customers and servers, and bar three would only be servers.  He thought that if bar one was making their money by flirting with the customers while bar three was making their money by server tip out then shouldn't they keep the tips they made (bar two would get a split of both)?  If one flirted more than three was tipped out then why should one have to give her money to someone else?

We would tell him that's the way it's always been done.  He would reply with whole litany of things:  we are rewarding mediocrity, we can't keep the better bartenders because they have to split their tips with a slacker.  Then he would bring us into it:  "What if we pooled the managers salaries and gave everyone an equal share?"  HELL NO!  (redneck club)  We liked being recognized for our work in the best to be recognized, frequent raises.  Some of us had worked at a sister club that had an upstairs VIP room and the servers there would pool their tips.  We mentioned that.  He was ready for that one, "Who are the VIP servers?  Young pretty girls?  And the older more experienced servers say they want to stay on the main floor?  Think about it, what does that tell you?"  He would talk to us about this because he wanted to know what would the owner say when he brought it up.

He brought it up to the owner.  The owner made his money on numbers; the more servers the better, the more dancers the better; in general, the more women the more money he made.  If a few bartenders or servers went somewhere else and we replace them with not so greatly skilled servers it doesn't really matter.

To paraphrase JW:  Fuck that bullshit.  You come in and work your ass off and you will make money.  If a slacker doesn't want to work then they can go home with chump change.