How critical is it to review employee performance? Part One
This week, guest writer Sonya Law walks us through the critical importance of the employee performance review in part one of a series.
It is very critical: you need alignment between the people and the work that needs to be done to achieve the strategy. Your people are your number one strategic competitive advantage. When businesses can unlock potential of all people it has a multiplier affect to the bottom line.
Its very important to have a business whose people are performing and heading in the same direction. It’s an obvious thing you can’t get anything done without the engagement of your people.
There are a number of factors for that too, which exist in today’s organisations:
- No clear direction: Often what happens is there is not clear direction from leaders.
- Feedback loop: There’s not always a feedback loop between the manager and employee on a regular and consistent basis.
- Celebrate achievements: Also, one of the things organisations don’t do very well is celebrate their achievements.
- Value your people: And the valuable work that employees do over the last 6 to 12 months is not recognised and highlighted in their mid-year or end of year review (EOY) or at all.
- Re-engage: Recommitting your people to the purpose and the strategy and their role in it is not something that is commonly practiced and should be.
As leaders, we get caught up in operations, in our own role, blinkers on, it’s very easy to fall into that trap especially during the pandemic, where for a lot of leaders it’s about keeping your head above water. It is the role of management to let people know what their contribution is and what their value is to the team and the organisation. Most people join organisations because they want to be part of something bigger than themselves.
So, it’s a really good opportunity to acknowledge those things as well as ASK your employees at the End Of Year (EOY) review:
- What are the roadblocks you are experiencing in your job?
- What are their ideas in terms of efficiencies and continuous improvement?
- Ideas on how they could do their job better? Innovation?
- Ask them if they would like to do more training, learn something new, that is going to help them to do a better job?
- Open up a feedback loop: Say to the person how can I as a manager, help you to perform in your job?
- Ask them are they open to opportunities for challenge and stretch goals?
It’s good to, in that conversation talk about challenges and stretch goals. What I am hearing from a lot of people lately that they are in a job, where they are somewhat happy, well paid, and it’s kind of easy and they are not really being challenged or stretched. So, they actually want to leave their organisation for an organisation that challenges and stretches them.
This is the responsibility of the manager to unleash that unrealized potential or capacity within the organisation and when we don’t capture potential it really hits the bottom line. In terms of productivity and efficiency, and revenue per headcount, so it is the role of the manager to always be thinking about how can I unlock the potential of my people. It starts and ends with potential.
Bias is a block to unleashing the Potential of employees?
As leaders, we experience bias in our decision making all the time, we put people in boxes because it enables us to make sense of the world and provides certainty something that still plagues us during the pandemic. Or we are too lazy to think about what that person’s potential is within the organisation. Managers who are disengaged have a detrimental impact on the overall performance and wellbeing of their team and organisation.
What can we do as leaders to overcome this bias?
To be aware of how limiting it is when we put people in a box, when we sit down at EOY review we need to appreciate that they are not the same person as they were when they started in the role and with the company.
Important preparation tips for Managers:
- Awareness of our own biases
- Look at your employees with fresh eyes
- Go in with the mindset like you are interviewing them for the first time
- Don’t assume, that their past performance is a reliable indicator of future performance.
We need to go into the EOY discussion with the employee as if we don’t know them because, our biases, and our assumptions, and experiences overpower where that person is.
This practice will ensure a successful EOY review on both sides. With the knowledge that people grow and change as people within an organisation. Consciously or not, we are putting people into boxes that underutilizes our Human Resources. By holding a space for employees, it enables you to assess their performance.
Exert from a Candid Conversation with Ron Slee:
(www.learningwithoutscars.org Podcast button)
Ron: The EOY and mid-year review is all about the employee, its not about the manager, and many times, most times, I don’t believe the manager knows how to do it?
Sonya: This is true. Some managers don’t want to do it, they find it intimidating.
Ron: Have you seen that?
Sonya: Yes, they just want it over and done with and tick the box, and send to HR. Often it comes back with limited feedback or comments. Yes, they talk with the employee and tick it off and go back to their job. They are often uncomfortable with having conversations about barriers they might be experiencing, professional and personal development questions, conflict in workplace and delivering feedback. Those skills are important but a lot of managers don’t like to do it, or want to do it.
Ron: Why?
Sonya: It opens them up, they won’t always have the answers.
Ron: We have to be vulnerable to each other. If I asked what I could do to improve my relationship with you as a worker of mine, that employee has to trust me explicitly, implicitly if they are going to tell me the truth. I don’t know that, that kind of trust exists? I get a paycheck, I don’t want to do anything that is going to jeopardize that paycheck, I need the paycheck. The employee is coming to the discussion nervously and anxiously, and the boss thinking what a pain in the neck. I am busy don’t they know that. We’re on the wrong foot from the start?
Sonya: True, there is also a power disparity which makes it difficult, in the workplace, often if face to face in the bosses’ office, manager title on the door, its intimidating. The employee just wants to get home, take a paycheck and goes into survival mode, which is quite common. Fear kicks in and fight or flight depending on the degree of trust.
In my next article we will explore this more on how to have a successful End Of Year (EOY) review in
Part Two: How to build trust and get the most out of the End Of Year (EOY) review.
Did you enjoy this blog? Read more great blog posts here.
For our course lists, please click here.
How Critical is it to Review Employee Performance? Part One
How critical is it to review employee performance? Part One
This week, guest writer Sonya Law walks us through the critical importance of the employee performance review in part one of a series.
It is very critical: you need alignment between the people and the work that needs to be done to achieve the strategy. Your people are your number one strategic competitive advantage. When businesses can unlock potential of all people it has a multiplier affect to the bottom line.
Its very important to have a business whose people are performing and heading in the same direction. It’s an obvious thing you can’t get anything done without the engagement of your people.
There are a number of factors for that too, which exist in today’s organisations:
As leaders, we get caught up in operations, in our own role, blinkers on, it’s very easy to fall into that trap especially during the pandemic, where for a lot of leaders it’s about keeping your head above water. It is the role of management to let people know what their contribution is and what their value is to the team and the organisation. Most people join organisations because they want to be part of something bigger than themselves.
So, it’s a really good opportunity to acknowledge those things as well as ASK your employees at the End Of Year (EOY) review:
It’s good to, in that conversation talk about challenges and stretch goals. What I am hearing from a lot of people lately that they are in a job, where they are somewhat happy, well paid, and it’s kind of easy and they are not really being challenged or stretched. So, they actually want to leave their organisation for an organisation that challenges and stretches them.
This is the responsibility of the manager to unleash that unrealized potential or capacity within the organisation and when we don’t capture potential it really hits the bottom line. In terms of productivity and efficiency, and revenue per headcount, so it is the role of the manager to always be thinking about how can I unlock the potential of my people. It starts and ends with potential.
Bias is a block to unleashing the Potential of employees?
As leaders, we experience bias in our decision making all the time, we put people in boxes because it enables us to make sense of the world and provides certainty something that still plagues us during the pandemic. Or we are too lazy to think about what that person’s potential is within the organisation. Managers who are disengaged have a detrimental impact on the overall performance and wellbeing of their team and organisation.
What can we do as leaders to overcome this bias?
To be aware of how limiting it is when we put people in a box, when we sit down at EOY review we need to appreciate that they are not the same person as they were when they started in the role and with the company.
Important preparation tips for Managers:
We need to go into the EOY discussion with the employee as if we don’t know them because, our biases, and our assumptions, and experiences overpower where that person is.
This practice will ensure a successful EOY review on both sides. With the knowledge that people grow and change as people within an organisation. Consciously or not, we are putting people into boxes that underutilizes our Human Resources. By holding a space for employees, it enables you to assess their performance.
Exert from a Candid Conversation with Ron Slee:
(www.learningwithoutscars.org Podcast button)
Ron: The EOY and mid-year review is all about the employee, its not about the manager, and many times, most times, I don’t believe the manager knows how to do it?
Sonya: This is true. Some managers don’t want to do it, they find it intimidating.
Ron: Have you seen that?
Sonya: Yes, they just want it over and done with and tick the box, and send to HR. Often it comes back with limited feedback or comments. Yes, they talk with the employee and tick it off and go back to their job. They are often uncomfortable with having conversations about barriers they might be experiencing, professional and personal development questions, conflict in workplace and delivering feedback. Those skills are important but a lot of managers don’t like to do it, or want to do it.
Ron: Why?
Sonya: It opens them up, they won’t always have the answers.
Ron: We have to be vulnerable to each other. If I asked what I could do to improve my relationship with you as a worker of mine, that employee has to trust me explicitly, implicitly if they are going to tell me the truth. I don’t know that, that kind of trust exists? I get a paycheck, I don’t want to do anything that is going to jeopardize that paycheck, I need the paycheck. The employee is coming to the discussion nervously and anxiously, and the boss thinking what a pain in the neck. I am busy don’t they know that. We’re on the wrong foot from the start?
Sonya: True, there is also a power disparity which makes it difficult, in the workplace, often if face to face in the bosses’ office, manager title on the door, its intimidating. The employee just wants to get home, take a paycheck and goes into survival mode, which is quite common. Fear kicks in and fight or flight depending on the degree of trust.
In my next article we will explore this more on how to have a successful End Of Year (EOY) review in
Part Two: How to build trust and get the most out of the End Of Year (EOY) review.
Did you enjoy this blog? Read more great blog posts here.
For our course lists, please click here.
The Digital Dealership: Information is the Core
The Digital Dealership – Information is the Core
At the core of the digital dealership is information. Tonight, Mets Kramer shares more about the key information you need.
Perform an Information Audit to develop your Digital Dealership
In our last podcast about the Digital Dealership, Ron and I discussed what some of the first steps are that any dealership should take to become a dealership of the future. Since the basis for the digital dealership is the complete use of information, I suggested the first step should be to review how the dealership is currently storing and using key information.
Key information, in the Digital dealership, revolves around the customer and equipment, and especially customer equipment data. To become an integrated dealer, making the most out of the information available, information needs to be collected, analyzed and shared among all areas of the business. It’s important that areas of the dealership don’t become information silos. It’s especially important that the different areas of the business don’t operate on disconnected versions of the same data.
To do this means a few things:
To prepare you for your dealership’s journey toward becoming a digital dealership the first step is to review existing systems, available information and the areas where information is missing. This Information Review identifies what needs to be done, where the problems lie and what systems are limiting your dealership’s efforts. This review is often hard to do with in house people. Most people are too busy running the day-to-day transactions in your dealership, but it’s also hard to find the things you don’t know to look for.
If you’re looking for a detailed review of your information systems, a strategic plan of issues to resolve and initiatives to complete on your Digital Dealership journey, my Company Strategic Evolutions (https://www.strategicevolutions.ca) can provide this service for you. With a week onsite, reviewing your systems and talking to people from marketing to service, we’ll prepare a detailed presentation and provide recommended activities to make information an important driver in your dealership’s growth and future.
Are you ready to see your Digital Dealership grow?
Me*********@*****************ns.ca
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Friday Filosophy v.8.27.21
FRIDAY FILOSOPHY v.8.27.21
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, 30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965 was a British statesman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. Churchill was a Sandhurst-educated soldier, a Nobel Prize-winning writer and historian, a prolific painter, and one of the longest-serving politicians in British history, he was a Member of Parliament from 1900 to 1964.
Of mixed English and American parentage, Churchill was born in Oxfordshire to a wealthy, aristocratic family. He joined the British Army in 1895 and saw action in British India, the Anglo-Sudan War, and the Second Boer War, gaining fame as a war correspondent and writing books about his campaigns. Widely considered one of the 20th century’s most significant figures, Churchill remains popular in the UK and Western world, where he is seen as a victorious wartime leader who played an important role in defending Europe’s liberal democracy against the spread of fascism. He is also praised as a social reformer.
The Time is Now
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The Digital Dealership: Change and Remaining the Same
The Digital Dealership – Change and Remaining the Same
In tonight’s blog, guest writer Mets Kramer continues to speak on the digital dealership with a look at change, and remaining the same.
I often hear, and most of us have said, the following word. “The equipment business is a relationship business”, “Relationships make the difference”.
Nothing could be truer about this industry. Our products create long term relationships because each of the products have a long-life cycle during which we need to engage with and support our customers. Relationships make all the difference during many phases of the machine’s life cycle. I first learned this lesson dealing with 330 Excavator issues. This work horse machine was relied upon by many customers, just it had lots of issues. Cylinders, pumps and final drives to name a few. Having a strong relationship helped us navigate the problems with the customers and come up with workable solutions and agreements. Through it all, we maintained the relationship and the next generation of the same machine still had lots of buyers.
So, this is often what I hear from dealers when talking about the development of the Digital Dealership. “Digital isn’t important, it’s a relationship business”. As if relationship is all it takes to maintain a customer. If that were true, we would all still have a roll of quarters in the truck and be looking for pay phones to get a hold of the office and the customer, rather than get a cell phone to get better.
The Truth is, while relationships matter, the digital transformation has supported it all the way and needs to continue to do so. It’s naive or “old fashioned” to get stuck in the glory of the past. Just like your cell phone caused the demise of the Pay phone because it allowed you to do things better. The rest of the digital world is there to support you. Not replace you.
This past week I sent my 4Runner in for service. Just for fun I went online, found the nearest dealer, booked an appointment, chose my preferred communication method, got a quote for the service and discussed additional required services at my mileage. Then I got to the Dealership and talked face to face with the person I’d been emailing with. All my car information was entered, and we wasted no time. I built a relationship with Jallone the Assistant Service Manager. He looked after my needs and I tried to steal him from automotive to the equipment business, because he did a great job. When the service was done, he followed up with electronic invoices and discussion on open items.
The Digital dealership supports and improves your existing operations, it does not destroy the value of relationships, it only makes them easier to create and maintain.
Take this example I heard from Alex Kraft at Heave.co this past week. A contractor told him he’s been waiting for 3 weeks to get a quote from his sales rep. All this customer wanted was a piece of paper (or electronic quote) for a machine, but the sales rep is too busy or the process too onerous to get a quote out. How is it helping that dealer and customer not to have the dealership invest more seriously in digital systems to provide quotes faster. In the end this contractor went to a new platform that exposed his needs to dozens of other dealers, who quoted him automatically or saw the Quote request and responded.
Digital supports your business; it doesn’t take away from it; unless you decide to implement it poorly.
How else does Digital augment your relationship?
A core aspect of the Digital dealership is the use of information. As the equipment expert your customer relies on, you need to be seen as the trusted advisor, not a quote provider or order taker. Find ways to use digital information to be ready to support your customer with all the equipment related information you can. Specs, performance, analysis, operating cost and market pricing data. When you become the Digitally enabled Trusted Advisor, you’re always welcome.
Oh, and don’t forget to have inventory info at your fingertips and be able to price something.
Years ago, I had dinner with a colleague in Chicago during my only 1.5 years not in the construction equipment business. He told me a story of being a young regional manager, sitting with his customer. He proudly boasted about the improvement their business had made in delivery. He told his customer “We can now ship any product we have in stock to you in a week”. He was so proud of the giant gain in delivery speed. His customer looked at him and laughed “You’ve got to be F@#%@ kidding me, from stock to out the door in seven days???” Expectations are the point. Your customers have a learned experience of what’s possible. No matter how good you think you are, if someone is doing it better, that’s the new standard.
Creating a strong Digital Dealership, however that applies to your dealership, improves your relationship with your customer.
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Target Marketing
Target Marketing
In his guest post for this week, Ross Atkinson highlights the critical importance of technology when it comes to target marketing.
It is truly amazing how times have changed in the last 20 years! Dealerships have gotten larger through consolidation and spread further apart. The dealer is servicing more customers with less staff. Welcome to the world of running “lean and mean.”
The customers aren’t staying small either as they continue to expand in order to survive in this ultra-competitive world. As customers get larger, the likelihood is that someone other than the owner will be the one picking up or dropping off. The days of the customer grabbing a coffee, sitting down for a personal discussion and allowing you to get to know them better, is a faded memory of the good old days.
Technological advances can also be partly to blame for the lack of face-to-face interactions. It’s commonplace today for many transactions to be done without the need of talking to a salesperson by utilizing internet-based ordering systems. Let’s not forget, even if you do visit a bricks & mortar store, you may still have limited verbal communication with a human being considering the availability of digital lookup and self-checkout kiosks. And if the goods aren’t being delivered to your customer’s home or business, the conversation at pickup is trivial at best.
Even if we did have a need for human interaction, we have the next generation of workers who have grown up in an era of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It’s bad enough they don’t teach cursive writing or spelling in schools anymore, but with today’s youth spending countless hours in front of screens growing up, they are missing out on the opportunity to learn social skills with other people like their friends.
So as dealerships lose personal contact with their customers, they look to other means of communication and one of the few things available is technology. Using an automated, self-controlled method of recognizing certain conditions, a notification can be sent to the customer electronically or interactively. I call this “Target Marketing”. It is a term I use for targeting a single customer based on triggers or events that happen every day. Call it what you will, these kinds of systems are available today and can reach out to your customer through some form of digital communication like a text or email. It can let them know that their parts order has arrived or notify them when their machine is due for service. No more manually calling, no more busy signals, no more answering machines, and no more forgetting.
There are an endless number of “triggers or alerts” that can facilitate a communication to your customer. Words of warning though, do not go overboard. Ensure that the most important, time sensitive notifications take precedence. The last thing you want to do is alienate your customer by sending them 15 emails or texts a day.
Having this information sent to your customer’s fingertips can be very beneficial. The immediacy of the message sent to their phone or device allows them to take action right away. For the dealership, it eliminates the need for staff to take time away from their busy day to chase down the customer.
At the same time, the trigger and alert concept can also be used within the dealership to benefit the customer. When a work order is opened for a customer’s machine, wouldn’t it be important to know there is an outstanding recall?
Although the interactions between the dealership and the customer isn’t what it used to be, when you do get an opportunity to be face-to-face, take full advantage of the time to know your customer better. Wish them a Happy Birthday or thank them for their purchase. Ask them how they are doing and what’s happening in their business or personal lives. Your customers will appreciate the attention and interaction; you may actually learn something about them that will improve your relationship.
We should also consider what else computer systems can do to better understand and help the customers. With the collection and analysis of customer transactional data, you can get an understanding of specific patterns which may result in some form of target marketing for things such as bulk purchasing.
This same data analysis can also be significant for your dealership. It can help identify patterns such as peak order times so that you can staff accordingly or ensure that you have the appropriate stocking levels. It may even facilitate changes to your day-to-day business processes.
As you know, Ron’s podcast tagline is “The Time Is Now.” Well folks, if you want to keep in touch with your customers today, you better get on the technology bandwagon! The Time Is Now!
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Friday Filosophy v.8.20.21
FRIDAY FILOSOPHY c.8.20.21
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970 was a British polymath.
As an academic, he worked in philosophy, mathematics, and logic. His work has had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics. He was a public intellectual, historian, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate.
Russell was one of the early 20th century’s most prominent logicians, and one of the founders of analytic philosophy. Together with his former teacher Alfred North Whitehead, Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, a milestone in the development of classical logic, and a major attempt to reduce the whole of mathematics to logic (see Logicism). Russell’s article “On Denoting” has been considered a “paradigm of philosophy”.
Russell was a pacifist who championed anti-imperialism and chaired the India League. He occasionally advocated preventive nuclear war, before the opportunity provided by the atomic monopoly had passed and he decided he would “welcome with enthusiasm” world government. He went to prison for his pacifism during World War I. Throughout his life, Russell considered himself a liberal, a socialist and a pacifist, although he later wrote he had “never been any of these things, in any profound sense”.
The Time is Now
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The Digital Dealership – Self Serve
Digital Dealership – Self-Serve
In tonight’s blog, guest writer Mets Kramer continues to speak on the digital dealership and the freedom it gives us when it comes to self serve.
Satisfying our Self-Serve Desire
Last Month, I did something I haven’t in a long time. On a trip back home, I came across a Full Serve gas station and used it! These used to be the norm, no one pumped their own gas, and every teenager had a job. Then the world started changing. Gas became more expensive, as did the teens, and self-serve became more common. Why pay extra and wait for the slow teenager to pump your gas when you just do it yourself and get it done faster and easier? In the same way more and more things have become self-serve. Self-serve gives us the feeling of moving at the pace we want and reduces the need to interact with other people. It’s not that we’re asocial, but it does feel like other people slow us down, or we have to wait to get access.
So, now we live in a world that has been designed and tooled to allow us to do things for ourselves, often from our phone. Even the most “Full Service” new trend is really just self-service. Ordering your dinner though an app such as Uber Eats, or Door dash is really about satisfying your desire to make things easy and at your pace. Multiple restaurants are presented to you to review and decide what you’re “cooking for dinner”, payment is processed online, and the food shows up ready to go. A full Self-Service Experience.
The truth is, each of us are becoming more accustomed to and preferring of Self Service. It lets us do things when we want, where we want and at our own pace.
Your dealership should be no different. Your customers are people, like yourself, who increasingly prefer the self-service option. They want to have more information presented about their decision than if they call a person. Just like you, your customers research and look up information about what they need on a plethora of sites. Then they find the easiest way to acquire what they want or need. This is a significant change from the mindset of the past, which looked to person to person contact for the highest level of service.
So, what are the main aspects of a self-service approach in a Digital Dealership
First, don’t be short on information. If you have information to help the customer, make decisions, present it while the customer is in the research phase. If they don’t find what they are looking for, they, like you, are quick to do a second Google search for what they need. This information can be presented on open webpages, but also presented only to trusted visitors to your digital dealership.
Next allow your customers to communicate with you the way they want, but don’t “Drop the call”. Too many dealers drive their customers to forms that end up in email boxes. The response rate and times are terrible. If it, was you and any other method, you wouldn’t stand for it. So why do this to your customers. Make sure every channel is viewed in real time, during extended business hours. Make sure contact info is checked and related to your CRM data and finally make sure you respond quickly, and preferably in the format the customer contacted you.
Finally, enable delivery. By delivery I mean take the transaction as far as possible. If you’re listing items or services through any of your digital channels, enable an immediate action option. Call it a “Buy it Now” button. We are all familiar with that. This doesn’t mean you have to provide digital payment processing, but you can capture commitment from the customer. In this case we want to enable and cement the customer’s decision. When you offer the customer a “Contact Us” form to fill when they want to buy, it leaves the door open for them to keep searching. A “Buy It Now” button allows the customer to feel like they have solved their problem.
We all think our time is valuable. We want to make sure the time we spend on resolving a need, is efficiently spent. This is what has driven our Self Service digitally enabled world. When I go to Starbucks and order my coffee, I now do it from my app. It remembers what I want, it pays for me, and I just walk in and grab it from the counter. That’s a Digital Coffee Shop, supported by a bricks and mortar building with a real human barista. I always have the option to walk in and have a chat while I place my order, but I can use a digital channel if I’m in a hurry.
Your digital dealership shouldn’t be any different.
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Why do I do what I do?
Why do I do what I do?
In tonight’s blog, guest writer Ryszard Chciuk asks a question I think we have all wondered at one time or another: Why do I do what I do?
Contributing to someone’s improvement and understanding is the reason I do what I do.
Who said that? If you don’t know yet, please keep on reading.
This article is about the meaning of one’s live.
Jim Collins said in Good to Great: … it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.
Victor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning (over 12 million copies sold) says: … striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man. Victor Frankl also claims that Man … is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values! He also said: There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life. It has been said by a man who survived three years in four German concentration camps, including Auschwitz.
In that book Victor Frankl reminded results of several public opinion polls: The results showed that 89 percent of the people polled admit that man needs something for the sake of which to live, around 60 percent of the people polled conceded that there was something, or someone, in their own lives for whose sake they were even ready to die. In the statistical survey of 8 thousand students of 48 colleges, conducted by social scientists from Johns Hopkins University, students were asked what they considered “very-important” to them now. 16 percent of the students checked “making a lot of money”; 78 percent said their first goal was “finding a purpose and meaning to my life.”
The polls were made some time ago, but my experience tells me the latest results would be much worse. I mean there are much more students and adults interested in earning more money and fewer people searching for the meaning of their lives. Using Frankl’s words: they are caught in that situation which I have called the “existential vacuum”. For such a man No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).
To complete this long introduction, I will remind only one sentence from Friedrich Nietzsche: He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.
A company does not have its brain (at least at the beginning of the 21st century), so it can not suffer from the existential vacuum. The feeling of meaninglessness is not painful for a company. But no organization exists without the brains of its employees and managers. If you, as their leader, are aware that a significant part of your staff is searching for the meaning of their lives or suffering from the existential vacuum, you should help them. I do not expect you will create an internal department of logotherapy. Nevertheless, why you could not extend the medical healthcare package and allow some of your people to visit a logotherapist?
Anyway, I believe the person searching for the meaning of his life will be inspired by the mission of the team he is a part of, and adopt it as a kind of response to his problem. And those who already have a sense of meaning will find that working for you helps them to fulfill their life mission.
My life mission is to leave the world when it is a little bit better than it was before I arrived here. Does it sound general, audacious, pompous? Not for me, but as a manager, I made my mission’s definition more specific. I utilized over twenty years of experience collected during my service for the construction company. In that time, as a machine user and an internal service provider I believed I had learned the basic expectations of all machines’ users:
When I got a chance to attend the creation of a new dealership for Volvo CE, I expressed my new after-sales department mission as follows:
That mission statement became a basic foundation for defining our department’s vision and the main principles (values).
The life mission has to be adapted to the changing conditions, so since I got retired, I feel personally obliged not to spoil our planet to a higher degree than the average homo sapiens does. It comprises also sharing my experience in the construction industry with my successors. I would like them to avoid my mistakes. This is the reason to write posts for the Learning Without Scars blog and to publish articles on my blog dedicated to construction machine users and their closest collaborators – after-sales departments personnel (only in Polish – note: and they are all excellent).
I owe you a response to the question I started my blog post with. This is Ron Slee answer to the most important question a human being has to ask himself: why do I do what I do? Helping students of The Learning Without Scars to succeed is his, and his company mission, his WHY.
Dear reader, what is your mission, what is your WHY, have you already found the meaning for your life?
As Ron says, the time for your answer is now.
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Friday Filosophy v.8.13.21
Friday Filosophy v.8.13.21
Our Friday Filosophy v.8.13.21 offers thoughts from Aristotle with quotes that highlight the thinking of one of the most influential philosophers the world has ever known. He was a student of Plato and the Tutor to Alexander the great.
Aristotle was revered among medieval Muslim scholars as “The First Teacher” and among medieval Christians like Thomas Aquinas as simply “The Philosopher”, while Dante (one of the most important poets of the Middle Ages) called him “the master of those who know”. His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, studied by medieval scholars such as Peter Abelard and John Buridan. Aristotle’s influence on logic continued well into the 19th century. In addition, his ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics.
Aristotle has been called “the father of logic”, “the father of biology”, “the father of political science”, “the father of zoology”, “the father of embryology”, “the father of natural law”, “the father of scientific method”, “the father of rhetoric”, “the father of psychology”, “the father of realism”, “the father of criticism”, “the father of individualism”, “the father of teleology”, and “the father of meteorology.”[8]
The Time is Now.
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Friday Filosophy V8.6.21
FRIDAY FILOSOPHY V8.6.21
Our Plato quotes put the spotlight on one of the most influential philosophers the world has ever known. He was a student of Socrates and an instructor to Aristotle in the middle fourth century B.C. He grew up in Athens, Greece, and was also influenced by Parmenides and the Pythagoreans.
As Socrates never put anything down in writing, Plato is also known for being Socrates’ primary author and most reliable.
The Time is Now.
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