Negativity comes from the top down in any organization. Never from the bottom up. As far as my personal situation I often am the buffer for negativity from the customer caused by lack of responsiveness or simply lack of communication from the owners. After a while it does build up. Never said I was just some field mechanic. My own presence at the dealership drives in a substantial and quantifiable amout of new equipemnt sales each year. It is the true ability to relate to the farmer customer that does this, even if I do have to put up with the negative parts of it.

On the other hand the inability to discuss this negativity in the organiztion for fear of loosing employment in itself will cause a major undertow of such feelings from your employees. Depending on what your business is it will suffer. The highly skilled, highly educated individual will not put up with your management style for long. The unskilled, under-educated type will put up and shut up as you essentially said you expect from an employee.

Just to make a point, there is one business around here run perhaps more extreme than yours. Its a fairly large trucking company hauling mostly aggragate and bulk materials. They have an extremely high driver turn over from both drivers quitting as well as firings. They go so far as to offer a reward for any driver that turns in another driver for saying anything bad about the company or its owners even away from work. The owner also has a 24 hour bodyguard service hired these days. Not usual sort of thing in farm country, now is it?

What seems to get your attention, and maybe I'm wrong, is the willingness to speak about common practices in the machinery dealer business to anyone not in a closed circle. Why don't we just bring up the idea being pushed by major manufactures toaday that all dealerships should operate on flat rate billing and as part of that practice that the customer has no right to know what the shop rate is. See I have no problem about speaking of common practices out in the open. To turn this around, if I worked at Cargill and also farmed, if I were to complain about the prices paid to farmers and the high basis, but some on this board new I worked at Cargill, should I be fired for speaking about this? The fact is information about the workings of the grain industry is far more open that the workings of a supplier business. So just for that I should be fired from my job?

This is America after all. Freedom to speak is paramount to the existance of a democracy.