“The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.” ~ Vince Lombardi
Whenever I travel, I have a habit of wandering across to the bookshop at the airport to have a look at the latest releases in a number of genres. What amazes me is the seemingly endless output of business writers on the subject of being a great leader, motivating your troops, being successful and managing the **** out of anything, whether it is your life, your lover, your job, department, organisation, pet, you name it. If I was to judge the state of affairs according to most popular book titles I would say we are all out of control - business success is more voodoo than logic and none of us really has a clue of where it is all going. Hence our insatiable appetite for books that tell us how it should 'really' be done.
Mind you, I don't have a PHD in management science, or whatever the degree is called these days - so you may want to take what I say with a pinch of salt. After all, a selection of nifty acronyms after my name surely would make me sound more credible? What I'm about to propose is sadly not rocket science, nor is it very advanced thinking either, but somehow we have lost sight of those simple facts and fallen victim for an ever increasing appetite to have experts tell us what we already know deep inside anyway:
3 steps to happiness:
What makes a great
workplace and happy employees? It's not countless training courses or
'away-days' or even a selection of free cakes and an office dog. It is
three very simple things:
1. Respect - To be respected for who you are and what you know and to be treated decently and above all fairly in areas such as pay, benefits and job security. Nobody wants to have to keep politicking to keep their jobs and if you have to scratch someone's back to have greater job security, you really start wondering whether it is worth it.
2. Achievement - as the quote above, we need to be able to be proud of our jobs, our accomplishments and recognised for them, and we need to be able to be proud of our employer too.
3. Friends - It is infinitely more fun to come to work if you have friends there, people you genuinely like, respect for their skills and knowledge and people you have productive relationships with. Together with these people you excel beyond what you could do on your own and the camaraderie makes it all a great deal of fun.
I have been giving managers a hard time in a few posts recently, but that is not to say that they are defunct. We need managers and above all we need good ones. People who not only know what they are talking about, but are people we respect for their knowledge, skills and ability to not just deliver on the points above, but also to instill an evocative purpose to all the work. Indeed, the book Built to Last lists numerous examples of companies that have managed to raise their ethos above and beyond merely making money, and are heralded as some of the most successful companies around.
This article by the Harvard Business Review, provides some great insights on how to create a culture through good management, which addresses the issues above. It has been brought to my attention that the list I had been sent and was using in this post before, was in fact an indirect infringement on copyright, so for the real McCoy, follow the link above! My sincere and humble apologies!
I have good field managers, but the corp.managers and VP's above care nothing about the items listed above. All they count are beans, and we don't mount to a hill of them. But I've found this to be true of most of the Fortune 500 crowd....
Posted by: Jay | January 23, 2008 at 20:23
Its sometime really hard to make sure employees are happy, but without agood emplyoee no company can work to its maximum potential
Posted by: Employment Finder | January 21, 2008 at 14:57