One in twenty adults in the US and Canada have alcohol use disorder. If you are a business owner, entrepreneur, or CEO with more than twenty employees you likely have one that is an alcoholic. Many women have challenges with alcohol just like men. Just because they are high performers, have a “normal” outside life, don’t slur their words, or fall down doesn’t mean that an employee isn’t an alcoholic. I fit all of those and I’m still an alcoholic. The key is to be curious, rather than in denial, if you think you have an employee with an alcohol problem.
If you don’t know what to do with an employee with an alcohol problem? Give me a call at +1 (604) 721-5732 or Contact Me. We can have a confidential conversation on what you are seeing.
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Transcript
Are any of my employees alcoholics?
Hi everyone. I’m Coach David J. Greer. Today I want to talk to you about your employees and whether some of them might be alcoholics. The overall numbers in Canada and the US indicate that approximately 5% of the adult population are suffering with alcohol use disorder. Other studies or numbers that I’ve seen would indicate it’s closer to 10 or 12%, but let’s say it’s 5%. If you have 20 employees, then likely you have one that has alcohol use disorder. And if you have a hundred employees, you have five. So yes, it’s very likely that if you are in a larger company, you have employees who are alcoholics.
Now what about male versus female? Yes, it’s true that there are more men alcoholics than women, but it’s not by a huge number. Women are quite likely to be alcoholics as men and you shouldn’t assume that just because someone is a woman that they’re not an alcoholic.
What about high performers? High performers often are alcoholic too, because high high performers often use alcohol as a coping mechanism for the stress of being a high performer. I know what that’s like, because I’m a high performer and that is one of the ways that I used alcohol and my alcoholism was to just cope with the stress of trying to do too much. You shouldn’t assume that just because someone is a high performing person, that they are not an alcoholic.
Too much in the media in common understanding, we think of alcoholism as a disease that only affects people who are down and out, who live on the wrong side of the tracks, who are living rough. The truth is alcoholics are you, me, our neighbors, our friends. They are just people like us. I hear other business owners, entrepreneurs and CEOs say, “Well, that person can’t be an alcoholic. They’re married. They have a house. They have two cars.” Well, I’m married. I have three kids. I have a house. I’m an alcoholic. So that doesn’t have anything to do with it. You can be all of those things and still be an alcoholic. I was a high performing, high functioning alcoholic, which meant that I didn’t slur or fall down when I had a lot to drink because I had a very high capacity for alcohol. And I was still an alcoholic.
Now if you smell alcohol on an employee’s breath, does it make them an alcoholic? Not necessarily. It should raise some questions in your mind. If you have an ounce and a half of hard liquor, a six-ounce glass of wine, or a 12-ounce drink of beer, it’s exceedingly unlikely you’d be able to smell that from a normal, conversational distance. If my spouse has a glass of wine and we go to kiss, yes, maybe I could smell a little bit of alcohol, but we’re talking an employee kind of relationship. If you can smell alcohol, I can pretty well guarantee that they had more than one drink.
Similarly, if a prospect, a client, a partner, another employee report smelling alcohol on someone’s breath, then it’s certainly something that needs more investigation, because most normal people who don’t have the disease of alcoholism don’t end up having enough drinks during work time to smell it on their breath.
And finally, I just want to encourage you as an entrepreneur and business owner to not be in denial about employees and about their drinking. I think that the first response often is, “Oh, it couldn’t be Jane. It couldn’t be Joe. I’ve known them. And I know that they don’t have a problem.” Well, you probably don’t know because we’re really good at hiding it. We’re really good at coping with our alcoholism and still delivering on our work. And we’re really the only ones that ultimately know. I encourage you to be curious about it, because there is a good chance that at least one of your employees is an alcoholic.
