Is Your Captain Taking You For Granted
They say “work for cause and not the applause,” but what if your Captain is unbearable? With 2016 coming to a close; crew are exhausted from labouring the yachting seasons and emotions are running high as yachties accept that they might not be making it home for the holidays. Having a bullying, unappreciative or heedless Captain only aggravates an already tense work environment. Here are 4 signs your Captain is taking you for granted:
Your Captain is ALWAYS unsatisfied with your work.
If I had a penny for every time a crew member heard “That’s not how we do things on this yacht,” I could, well, buy my own yacht.
Captains are allowed to be particular about procedures on their vessels, whether the yacht owner has specifically requested it or the Captain’s conducted it in a certain way on his yachts for years. If that is the case then crew must be briefed. Before service begins and the passengers arrive, the Captain and his HoD’s need to school the crew on specific tasks and procedures or they are setting the crew up to fail.
There is nothing more frustrating than ‘you’re doing it wrong’ if ‘do it this way instead’ isn’t offered. It feels like professional sabotage and the Captain won’t instill much trust or confidence in the rest of the crew.
Your contribution is NEVER acknowledged.
If you’re expecting a pat on the back everytime you do something right, or a gold star on your service review, at the end of season, you’re in the wrong profession.
The yachting industry is reserved for people with tough skin and strong wills. Captains can’t be expected to congratulate you for doing your job. Words of encouragement and appreciation every once in awhile, though, won’t go amiss.
You can tell how good a Captain is by the productivity of his crew is. If yacht staff feel valued they will endevour to go over and above their call of duty because they believe in the success of service, and they don’t want to let their Captain down. If your hard work continues to go unnoticed it might be time to consider the possibility of exploring employment elsewhere.
Your Captain expects you to do things not in your portfolio
Ever encountered a person who doesn’t recognize the extra things you do for them until you stop and then they complain? If this is something you are experiencing with your Captain it is a sure sign you are being taken for granted.
At the beginning of service crew is usually full of energy; bright eyed, bushy tailed and ready to hit the ground running. Deck crew might be found assisting in the galley, if they’ve powered through their morning tasks and finished early. A budding stew, interested in engineering, might sneak below deck just to shadow the engineers for an hour or two.
On a well run yacht, crew members are helping each other out because they want to. If your Captain repeatedly asks you to do things not part of your portfolio either he made a bad hire he’s hoping you’ll make up for or he is a bad leader/delegator. Either way he is not respecting the position you hold on the vessel.
Your gut feeling is that you aren’t being valued
If you feel like you’re being taken for granted, chances are you’re probably right. So often we stay in bad professional situations because we think we are imagining the ill-treatment and unproductive working conditions. Feelings that strong aren’t created in a vacuum. Obviously, there are situations and circumstances that feed into those feelings of being undervalued.
We need to learn to trust our own intuition. Realise we deserve better and go about acquiring it.
Being taken for granted at work can really break a crew members spirit. There are a number of options you can explore if you are not happy. We always suggest talking to your Captain about it because they may not even know they are doing it. One thing’s for sure; you shouldn’t feel you have to just accept things as is. Your professional and personal prosperity depends on it.