Veteran employees are either a company's asset or its biggest adversary, and a boss's view likely differs before and after being harmed. Of course, there is no absolute good or bad in the world, and in business, there is even less absolute right or wrong. Some bosses value veteran employees highly for their own reasons, but these reasons are often one-sided. From an objective standpoint, or from the veterans' perspective, many of these so-called reasons may not hold water.

Reason 1: Emotional attachment to veteran employees When people spend a long time together, emotions naturally develop. Even with pets like cats and dogs, we grow attached over time. However, interpersonal relationships have a dual accumulation effect: over time, both affection and complaints accumulate. Bosses give salaries and bonuses, bringing benefits, which fosters affection. But bosses also infringe on employees' interests—through fines, criticism, or disrespect—which breeds complaints. Both affection and complaints accumulate simultaneously; as many years of affection as there are, there are as many years of complaints. Thus, the so-called affection is often one-sided from the boss's perspective, while veterans hold both affection and equal amounts of complaint toward the boss.

Reason 2: Responsibility toward veteran employees In the early days of a business, some employees join and struggle together to this day. These veterans have spent their most precious youth in the company, giving up many things and opportunities. Some bosses feel guilty and thus remain lenient even when veterans' current performance and output are limited, believing they are being responsible, even willing to support them into retirement.

Naive! Being responsible to employees is not just giving them a meal; it's ensuring they have sufficient self-reliance and development capability—not only within your company but also outside, so they can thrive anywhere. Specifically, responsibility means helping veterans grow enough to gain broad recognition of their personal value in a region, even elevating to the level of cultivating talent for society. That is true responsibility, not just keeping them on the payroll.

Reason 3: Veterans are familiar with company operations That's true—they've been there for years, so they know the company well. But what's the value? It should be the boss's job to ensure employees become familiar quickly, through job descriptions, internal and external introductions, workflow, and execution standards. These tools and systems allow new employees to get up to speed fast, rather than letting them slowly figure things out, wasting not only their time but the company's time assets.

Reason 4: Veterans know the market Like knowing the company, they're in the market daily, so they know it. But this brings two issues: First, should the boss create detailed market introduction materials or hold briefings to inform employees more efficiently, saving them from slow self-discovery? Second, with such familiarity, might they become numb to market changes? Once numb, does their innovation awareness decline? Why do veterans often miss problems and innovation opportunities that new employees spot? Because new employees are unfamiliar with the market, they can generate fresh ideas. In contrast, how many new ideas have these market-savvy veterans proposed over the years?

Reason 5: Veterans know clients and have relationships Business is about relationships, as everyone knows. From a sales perspective, employees do maintain client relationships. But bosses must consider: are these relationships built on the company or on the individual employee? In reality, when employees interact with clients long-term, personal relationships develop, and some employees may think, "These are my personal clients, maintained by my personal connections; they cooperate with the company because of me; I bring in the business." Clients belong to the company; employees are just executors. Where should client relationships fundamentally reside? How to separate and position employee relationships versus company relationships? How to guide personal relationships between employees and clients? These are questions bosses need to rethink.

Reason 6: Veterans have accumulated sufficient work experience French writer Romain Rolland once said, "Most people die at thirty because they repeat themselves thereafter." A ten-year veteran seems to have ten years of experience, but is it ten years of continuous experience or ten one-year experiences? These are entirely different. Clinging to old experience, resisting innovation, suppressing new employees' fresh ideas, even holding onto old ways until death—this is why new product launch success rates decline and innovation results fall short of expectations, often due to veterans' stubborn adherence to old thinking and experience.

Two major challenges in HR management are the inability to truly understand employees deeply and constant variability, and managing veterans is even more so. I don't completely deny veterans' value, but I advise bosses to view them rationally, not based on subjective ideas, and not to replace employees' own thoughts with unilateral judgments. Reduce emotional factors and increase objective, rational analysis.

Pan Wenfu: Born from private business owners, he operated a family distributor company for over a decade and held positions as sales manager, marketing manager, and trainer at several famous manufacturing companies, giving him dual perspectives as a distributor owner and a manufacturer's dealer manager. His research focuses on internal management optimization, corporatization, innovative business strategies, operational cost savings, and manufacturer-distributor relationship optimization. He maintains the largest distributor topic database in China, with long-term collection and solution research on over 400 topics related to distributor companies.

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