The perfect alibi: when the failure of management is declared the laziness of a people

There is an old refrain, repeated so often in offices, business cafés and television studios that for many managers it has become a kind of sacred dogma: "It's not the firm's fault. It's the worker's fault, he doesn't want to work."

It is the most comfortable sentence Albanian management has ever invented.

And let us be clear about why it is used so eagerly: because the alternative is unbearable for their ego. If it is admitted that the fault lies with the firm, then the fault does not float orphaned in the air. It takes a name. It falls directly on the one who built the system, the one who sets the rules, the one who decides the pay and the one who makes the decisions every day: it falls on the owner himself. And for a man who has built his authority on the illusion of being infallible, accepting responsibility is impossible. So the quickest way out is to declare an entire people guilty.

Let me be completely clear. Albanians are not a people who hate work. Albanians refuse to accept humiliation as a condition of employment.

Let us set this myth against one simple fact that no one can deny.

Look at what happens the second these young men and women cross the border. In Germany, in Italy, in England and everywhere around the world, they take on long shifts in logistics, on building sites, in hotels and in hospitals. They wake before dawn, work with iron discipline, carry loads, keep to the hours and earn the respect of foreign employers as some of the most hard-working people there are.

How is it possible that the same person who in Durrës or Tirana is declared "a lazy one who doesn't want to work" becomes a model employee the moment he walks into a warehouse in Munich or London?

Does his blood change on the way? Does his DNA change at the airport?

No. What changes is the system.

Abroad, that person faces a contract that is respected, a clear operating process where he knows exactly what is expected of him, overtime paid to the last cent, and a workplace where his sweat is recognised as a contribution with dignity. In his own country, the same person is expected to accept a wage that does not even guarantee his children's bread, to put up with the shouting of a manager who does not know even the most basic processes, to mop the floor outside any job description, and at the end to be told that keeping him on is a favour.

When one employee leaves your company, it may be an isolated case. But when dozens of people leave your company every year, when the recruitment doors stay open without end and no one turns their head to come, this is not a crisis in the morals of the young. It is an open indictment of the way you lead.

To say that "people don't want to work" when you offer survival conditions is like throwing seed on dry rock and then cursing nature because nothing grows. Work is not born of pressure, nor of complaints on television screens. Committed work is born when you create an environment where a person sees that their effort has meaning and an honest reward.

True leadership is measured by the courage to take responsibility. It is very easy to sit in the big chair and take the credit for every success while billing every failure to those at the base. But the history of management teaches us one unshakeable rule: the problems of an organisation always flow from the top down, not from the bottom up.

If Albanian managers want people to return to work with commitment and trust, they must have the courage to give up this cheap alibi. They must sit down, look at the weaknesses of their own systems, fix the way they treat people, and understand that the one thing this market lacks is not the desire to work, but the vision to lead with fairness.

Because at the end of the day, when everyone has left and you are alone in your empty office, there will be no worker left to throw the blame on. There will only be you, facing your own mirror.