You said: > Employees at this level are astoundingly uninterested in performing well, or, in other words, there is a reason they are working entry-level positi

You said: > Employees at this level are astoundingly uninterested in performing well, or, in other words, there is a reason they are working entry-level positions. This makes management yet more difficult because managers may have to become near micro-managers of cat herds trying to get the company to produce whatever it is supposed to produce. which very much sounds like an indictment of all low skill workers. If you didn't mean that, perhaps you could reword that paragraph. I haven't managed a business employing low-skilled workers because--and the reason that I grew up on food stamps--my father owned his own small business employing two to three such workers digging ditches or running electrical and construction type work. And the margins were incredibly thin and he paid them almost nothing and we still didn't have enough to eat. At various times throughout my childhood, those workers would inevitably have a heated argument with my father or otherwise steal from or slight him in some way. I think about that time a lot. Part of the reason that I think he continually failed as a manager/owner was that he had worked for medium sized companies when he was younger and went about replicating their management style in his own business. I often wonder if he would have done better if he made and treated these employees more as co-founders in a venture and allowed them have a sense of ownership and self-direction. I'll never know.