Loyalty

Loyalty is a term that loses its impact on use. It’s a word we hear so often we become disassociated with it. It’s cerebral, requiring an understanding that penetrates deeper than a superficial definition to appreciate. I’m not simply speaking of loyalty to friends or family, but loyalty in business. I’ve worked in a number of companies over the span of my life, and one of the things I can proudly claim is consistency in loyalty to my peers and my employees. My loyalty stemmed from my unwavering belief in what I was doing. Loyalty is critical; it’s a building block right alongside trust and integrity. I am loyal to my employees and in turn, they are loyal to me. I still have the first person I ever hired. We may have had our ups and downs, but through all of the debates and scuffles, we’ve maintained a strong relationship. In all of the frustration, I never lost faith. In being so loyal to them, I came to learn that a lot of my struggling came from a fear of failure. I was so loyal to my employees because I knew if I didn’t make it, they wouldn’t make it either. If you have 35 employees, each of them with a spouse and a few kids, suddenly you have about 150 people depending on your success. That’s a lot of pressure.

I see that with business that loyalty isn’t a guarantee. You can work your nose to the grindstone and you’ll be dropped if you’re just a margin off. Pick up the phone and say, “hey man what’re you doing? I’ve been loyal to you and you’re taking advantage of me.” Take another look and those prices may have changed. I struggle with this because loyalty is deep and complex--it’s one facet of character that people don’t truly appreciate. If someone has demonstrated consistent loyalty to you and you take advantage of them, you’re not being loyal, you’re breaking a trust. You want to be loyal to your family, loyal to your church, and anyone you encounter—by being loyal to others, you’re loyal to yourself. Loyalty may cost you sometimes, because it doesn’t always mean doing what’s best for you, sometimes it means having to put another person first. It’s less of a “me” experience and more of an “us” experience. But anyone who’s maintained a relationship that was rooted in loyalty knows that eventually, your investment in that will come back around to you. What goes around comes around.

You have to wonder if those individuals who might not be so loyal or trusting are this way because they’ve been so beat down and weathered. Is this kind of behavior a learned behavior? Something they’ve experienced to such a degree that this is all they know? It’s amazing to think that loyalty is such a deficit in the collective conscience of people these days because at some point we stopped being honest with each other. Often enough, parents have to split up—sometimes it’s healthy, more so it’s not. The mother and the father will bicker, usually over the reasons they broke up, and unsurprisingly, infidelity is one of them. It creates a vicious cycle. A routine develops expectations in the eyes of their children, who come to expect and emulate their behaviors, but this isn’t new. Mankind has been struggling with loyalty since the dawn of time. In the Garden of Eden, God created man and woman. They were given free will. Mankind had a choice, and God had a choice. He could have punished them, erased us from the earth, but He was loyal through these difficulties and to the very end. He provided for them, despite their failures and offered salvation to all of mankind. That’s a standard I could never live up to, but strive to practice.