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The Curse of Complacency in Loss Prevention

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Authored by Wayne Hoover CFI, Owner/Vice President of Programming at Wicklander-Zulawski and Executive Director for IAI

Complacency in Loss Prevention (or any other business setting, for that matter) can be that thief in the night, sinister friend who sidles up next to you and gets comfortable without you even realizing it. Complacency makes itself at home wherever and whenever we allow it; in our eating and exercise habits, on the job, in our relationships.

Many times it takes someone from the outside looking in to point it out to us, which usually that means we’ve gotten to be best friends with our complacency. Now it’s become a bad habit we have to break, almost like an addiction.

It might be your best friend, spouse or boss who points it out to you. Hopefully you are adept at self-criticism and you recognize complacency yourself.

If not, here’s how to recognize when you’ve let the curse of complacency take hold.

Do you tell yourself these things?

  • “This has always worked for me in the past.”

  • “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

  • “No one will notice if we keep doing it this way. They’ve never noticed before”

  • “I’ve never heard of that so it can’t be legit.”

  • “That’s way off in the future. We don’t need to react to that now.”

Whether it’s developing a strategy to audit your interviewers, re-evaluating your key control, or coming up with a more secure IT infrastructure, we have to all get in front of our complacency and battle it at every turn.

Do periodic check-ins. Are you running from one fire to the next with extinguishers blazing or do you set aside time weekly, or better yet daily, to strategize and evaluate how your business is going? Force yourself to make the time and make the time sacred. No interruptions! It’s very easy to move this time back or remove it altogether among competing priorities.

Complacency can be like a comfy old slipper, it’s easy to keep going back to the same old habits. Break out of the complacency trap and try on something new…you just might like it!

 
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