By George, Your Yoke Ain’t Light

Part 4 of Epic Mini-Series: God is Good. Mullets are Bad.

Over the course of the several iterations of my professional journey, I’ve served as a business consultant helping small businesses get unstuck, advance their plans, increase their footprint, and magnify their brand. 

One of the first steps I take when engaging with a new client is reviewing their Employee Handbook and P&P’s (Policy and Procedures).  These are the governing documents of life at the Company: how the Company expects its employees to behave and, if done correctly, how the employees can expect the Company itself, to operate. 

Policies and Procedures always start off with these great pump-up paragraphs of how they’re aiming to change the world; be the best place to work; do right by their staff and their families.  All good stuff. 

Then, after laying out definitions and boundaries for benefits, shifts, hourly vs salary, etc., the content will eventually transition to bullet lists of specific rules and regulations.  And this, is where it starts to get interesting. 

THIS is where I make the popcorn and curl up with a blanket – because the sections of Corporate Policy that are coming up are more like the subtext from Human Resource’s private diary than, how-to’s and what-to’s and do-not-do’s. 

And when I sit down to debrief Company Leadership at a later date on my initial findings and where I think we should start to make their Company great again, I always start by explaining the why behind my process:

“Show me your policies, and I’ll show you your pain.” 

That means, through the seemingly indiscernible Matrix-like code that falls vertically down the screen – all the minutia of how to request PTO and defined Company Holidays – you can actually tell a lot about the ownership and leadership of any organization by the rules they put in place. 

What they really care about, they get REALLY specific about:

Staff must turn off the meeting room lights upon exit.

Smoking must occur at least 15ft from an entrance, or in the Company parking lot.

The leadership doth protest too much, me thinks! 

I mean, I get it.  But do you really need to legislate adults in Company-governing documents the way grandparents micromanage the grandkids onto the carpet protectors?! 

Here are a few of my faves:

Blockbuster video rentals are not a valid company expense. 

The Worship Pastor may not meet 1:1 with female staff.

Oof. 

I call these, Tree Rings. 

When I see policies like these in print, I don’t even see the code, I see when a past budgetary drought exposed what Employees have tried to get away with in the past or the fires mid-level Management has caused the entity over the years. 

And I’m sure HR means well, but what they don’t realize is that every following years’ inserted (and underlined) line into policy – intending to prevent history from repeating itself – not only provides an accumulating record-keeping of the immoral inclinations of the staff, they actually historically, consistently, and paradoxically dictate an inglorious future. 

Let alone, the IRONY between the lines: if you haven’t updated your undergirding corporate-culture guiding documents since the collapse of a VHS-distribution, brick-and-mortar institution – which, went extinct because its leadership failed to see the big picture – it’s clear your attention is on the TREES. 

And you’re lost. 

And now you need a business consultant to help restore focus to the forest. 

And I’m happy to help.  By the hour.

Again, there’s no judgement, per se: protecting the Brand by restricting the boys from the girls and prohibiting personal expenditures may actually help keep you from trending for all the wrong reasons, and the Company coffers secure. 

But what leadership typically don’t seem to understand is tougher regulations meant to secure the Starship Enterprise from future Klingon incursions don’t actually safeguard the Company AND serve only to expose the – literally: bolded, underlined, and italicized – wounds of its leadership. 

Because here’s the real irony of insecure leaders – and you need look no further than King George or John Hammond to prove it: ANY overreaching governance in reaction to a past event or individual bad actors does NOT serve the collective vision for an expansive empire.  Nor prevent the bad behavior of your increasingly captive staff. 

The tighter you get in policy, the more likely you are to host a Boston Tea Party without lysine contingencies. 

Because revolution was written into our genetic code by Adam, which means, unbeknownst even unto themselves, your employees can’t help but throw themselves at the Company’s electric fences to test them, and you, for weaknesses. 

Which means, the same ironies that dismantled Isla Nublar will also disembowel your credibility with the team AND cause chaos: the more specific controls you insert into the Codes and Ethics at your Company, the more the likely your systems will fail, and the more your Employees can actually get away with:

But, you didn’t say I couldn’t expense, Netflix. 

Clever girl. 

Here’s the thing: GOD KNOWS ALL THIS. 

He sees the end from the beginning. 

I mean, He wrote THE Book of Life. 

Which all means, He is fully aware that the human condition is an endlessly repeating proclivity to throw off the yoke of our oppressors and eat ourselves. 

HOW COME THEN it feels like Leviticus 19 – with all its prohibitions of gore and goth – reads like an Employee Handbook that was written after Heaven’s Human Resources Manager just got out of a bad relationship with an unfaithful, disingenuous tattoo artist, with an unabashedly red-neck aesthetic and vampire-like tendencies? 

If GOD knows granular policy ONLY results in greater likelihood for unGodly behavior, why then does He write into Holy Policy some very specific bullets of gross and grotesque behaviors – that are no-brainers, really – YEARS before they get to drink the milk and pour on the honey?

God is Good. Mullets are Bad. “By George Your Yoke Ain’t Light”  Behold(en), still. Copyright © 2023-25 Behold(en), still.