Saturday, December 15, 2007

Keep Busy

I’m sure there are times when you feel like you and a few others are the only people doing the work for your club, your church, your department or even your organisation, whilst others are content to keep their heads down and seemingly do very little.

Maybe this quote will help.

‘This situation is rather like a football match. Thousands of people desperately in need of exercise watching 22 people desperately in need of a rest’

Keep smiling – in all aspects of our lives and our work there are players and there are spectators

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am sure that we all recognise this and it is easy to label those others as lazy. I regularly meet managers who recognise this phenomenon in their teams. Usually they are the ones that worry about giving feedback, seldom delegate, don't trust others to do things as well as they would do them etc. Then they wonder why others are slow in coming forward. In fact it is their behaviour that generates the passive response from others. Most recently I had a manger who was moaning about the lack of initiative shown by his team members. He was a directive manager who chose to manage by exception (come down hard on those that make mistakes). And he wondered why his team members were nervous about taking risks! By helping him to behave differently he managed over time to elicit a very different set of behaviours from his team.
When you see a problem in the organisation start looking for solutions in ever increasing concentric circles - STARTING AT YOUR OWN DESK!

Trevor Gay said...

Mahatma Gandhi said – ‘You must be the change you wish to see in the world.’

My not so famous late beloved Dad always told me – ‘The easiest job to do is someone else’s.’

You are right about tidying up our own back yard before criticising others. Your recent manager was no doubt the sort who had the sign in the office that reads; ‘If morale does not improve around here the sackings will continue.’

I have never been able to understand what sort of weird character gets pleasure from ‘coming down hard on those who make mistakes’ - It is a style of management that never works in my opinion because it simply alienates your most valuable people.