“That is not my problem.”
If anyone in your business responds to a coworker or to a customer with “that is not my problem…”, your business is in serious trouble! These five words signal a dangerous situation where that employee is totally disengaged from the business and does not care about it, their coworkers, the customer or their career with your company.
I have heard these words many times over the years and other variants like:
“I’m amused when other agencies try to hire my people away. They’d have to ‘hire’ the whole environment. For a flower to blossom, you need the right soil as well as the right seed” William Bernback
William Bernback really hit the nail on the head with this quote. If we, as leaders, have created the proper environment within our organizations, we should not be concerned about losing our best employees to the competition because no one will want to leave. We will have a culture that attracts and retains employees and few recruitment agencies will stand a chance in luring our staff away .
The million dollar question is, what does this “miracle” environment or culture look like? What sort of “soil” do we need to have to promote the growth of our employees and our business?
“Without solitude, no serious work is possible.” Picasso
Our world today is incredibly busy (see Do You Suffer From Continue Partial Attention Deficit Syndrom) and interruptions are almost constant. In 1789, Benjamin Franklin said “. . . nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” I think in 2015’s world, we can revise this to say “Nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes and constant interruptions.” Chances are, a large percentage of you were interrupted by your office phone, cell phone, email, text message, instant message or some other modern day technical marvel at least once during the time it took to read this!
As business leaders we must set aside time that is insulated from interruptions so that we have time to strategically plan our business. We need to think through issues, set vision, direction, goals and communications. This cannot be done when you are being interrupted every 30 seconds! You need solitude to get serious work completed!
This past year has been a very busy year for me. I have been “on the road” for about 3 weeks out of every month, traveling all over the US and Canada, twice to Europe, twice to India and down to Mexico City. My main role on these business trips is to review projects and provide insights, connections, suggestions and guidance wherever possible for the managers that are running these projects. The project managers are as diverse as the projects themselves which vary widely from around $20 million to upwards of $350 million. This has made for a challenging year!
Besides striving to provide value on these projects, I also try to learn as much as possible wherever I go. One of the interesting observations I have made is that regardless of culture, business environment, language or time zone, everyone wants to be successful. However, only those that are willing to take responsibility for their success actually achieve it. What I mean by this is that the people that take responsibility for their success do not let anything stand in their way to achieving success. For example;
Back in May 2014, I wrote a blog post entitled How to Get the Pulse of Your Organization. In this post I described two techniques that can be used to effectively communicate and lead your organization; “Did You Know” emails and a web based employee feedback system. In this week’s article, I will introduce two other techniques that I used to communicate and keep my finger on the organization’s pulse.
