Ok – lets recap.

Mazlow’s hierarchy can be a useful and didactic tool for helping us reach our personal psychological potential. For personal growth, the pyramid has been a great success. Climb away.

Applying the pyramid to business however has yielded a different set of results.

In applying it to business: Mazlow tried. Mazlow failed. The pyramid crumbled.

From the rubble of Mazlow’s attempts, we can pick up the pieces and construct an altar worthy of your sacrifice.

The solution is best compared to a game of Carnival Duck Shoot. Do you remember this one?

A Duck enters the screen moving from left to right. Taking aim you shoot him right in the bullseye, reversing his course to the left from whence he came. Before he goes off the screen, you must shoot him again preventing him from crossing the screen. The woods lay on the right side, the pond on the left. If he successfully crosses to either side safely, he wins. You lose.

Your objective: shoot him, reversing his course before he reaches safety. Rinse and repeat. Collect points and when the game is over your initials will be forever celebrated on the main game screen among the all-time Duck-shooting greats. If you fail, you’ll run out of quarters and your pocket-full-of-change swagger goes silent.

This same concept applies to your employees, whomever they are. Whether traversing up the hierarchy or succumbing to fear and tumbling gracelessly to the bottom, your job is the same – prevent your employees from reaching enlightenment or collapsing in despair. Either douses the flames of productivity quicker than the ice bucket challenge on your rolled Cuban.

Simply stated: a duck which safely reaches the pond will no longer put dinner on your table. Same goes for an employee who reaches either nirvana or tears. In both scenarios, their usefulness has been exhausted.

Your Job: You NEED them to remain in Mazlow’s middle layers of the pyramid. How exactly does this work? Very simply, you need only commit 2 scenarios to memory.

Scenario #1 – Down-in-the-Dumps. Have an employee with health problems? Grieving from a loss? Got a heavy day-drinker on your hands? They probably can no longer focus on the work. This is a clear productivity fail. They are on the bottom of the hierarchy/pyramid/ladder and have hit rock bottom. It is time for Maslow to give them a nice psychological pick-me-up.

Solution – get them in touch with HR and the employee assistance program. Get their anti-depressant dosage dialed in and turn that frown upside down. When the tears dry up, they may need a little more help. If so, grab some strings and literally force those limbs to start ascending Maslow’s ladder marionette-style.

Scenario #2: The Giggling-Ghandi. Think down-in-the-dumps is your biggest problem? Wrong. That one is an easy fix. Worse case, you can replace them with a temp-agency hire. Your bigger problem is people who have ascended up Maslow’s pyramid and spend too much time at the water cooler metaphorically pontificating man’s inhumanity to man. Disperse them from the water-cooler and you’ll find them in the locker room discussing the benefits and efficacy of Norwegian-style scalding sewer-water cleanse body shots. Worse yet, try to fire one of these useless Zen-types and you’ll have a lawsuit on your hands faster than you can say “Namaste.”

This is a more difficult problem but with some instruction, it can also be solved. To do so, you will need to start chopping down their Maslow ladder one rung at a time. Just far enough, but not too far. Like the guy behind the deli counter slicing down a block of Muenster with a razor-sharp cheese-cutter, you’ll need to accomplish this task one thin slice at a time, and with focused precision. Exactly how you will do this us up to you but we can offer some guidance.

Employees atop the pyramid require a subtle approach. The soft sell. A velvet hammer. A tooth pull with a splash of novacaine. Here are a few examples of conversations which may knock these lofty employees from their perch:

• Remind them of the importance of giving. Give to others. We are all merely a few corporate decisions away from being on the street…in need of a handout.
• Announce March (or insert any random month here) is colonoscopy month. Anal-bear-trap cancer is the silent, painful, unspoken killer. Too bad early detection is only 10% successful. Can’t live without health insurance.
• Gosh, that stock market looks primed for a big, southward plunge. Well, no one really knows – but all the experts seem to agree. We all need more in retirement money.
• You look different. Like you are losing (or gaining) weight in your face. Is everything ok?

Given enough time, your down-in-the-dumps employees will eventually become giggling-Ghandis. And vise-versa.

You will need to be vigilant in searching for both. Early and often, circle the water cooler and breakup those conversations about intermittent fasting. Visit that corner bathroom stall and listen for a whimper and the sound of heroin being cooked over a spoon.

It’s time to to put on your camo and lace up those hunting boots. Duck is always in season so take your shot before they make it to the woods.

Kum-bay-yah bitches.