Loc’s Blog

I had a Eureka moment the other day during a training session. Now the point of attending workshops and taking courses is to learn new skills be exposed to new ideas. In this case, however, one of my fundamental thoughts about being a supervisor was challenged.

It had always been my thinking that I can and have motivated people.

It turns out, I have only paved the way.

Kris Robins, one of the facilitators of the Essential Skills for Supervisors Program through Northern Lakes College, told our Staying Positive – Rewarding and Energizing Employees class last Thursday that, as supervisors, we can only create the environment where people will be motivated, we don’t motivate people ourselves.

I have to agree when it is put that way. You can’t wave your magic wand and, presto, your employees will be motivated.

I suppose that is much like the old adage that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.

On the other hand, Kris noted, we can de-motivate people with a single action or word.

The class was asked to cite examples of what motivates and de-motivates us.

Motivating situations include the opportunity to make a difference, having varied and challenging assignments, a sense of pride in the organization, decisive leadership, the opportunity to learn, and the ability to reach new levels of achievement.

De-motivators cited include negativity, no flexibility, minimal or no communication, lack of variety, poor direction, bureaucracy, and employees thinking in terms of their own department and not the good over the overall organization.

I believe the best employees are self-motivated and our job as managers and leaders is to fuel their fire, to nurture their growth and to give them opportunities to succeed to even greater heights than they can on their own. Essentially, we need to take steps to eliminate items on the second list from our workplaces. Read the rest of this entry »

I realize that when you first started your business you may not have thought about EVERYTHING that would be involved with running a successful business, right?

You had a passion and interest in a particular product or service that you could offer and that you believed others would want. But there’s a LOT more to running a successful business than what meets the eye.
 
Here are some very common mistakes I see my clients and others I meet making every month in their businesses. The ones who end up being successful are the ones who REALIZE this and take steps to FIX their issues.
 
What mistakes are YOU making? Read the rest of this entry »

Nearly half of the World’s population are currently living below the $US 2 a day poverty line. These numbers only look to increase as the Global population is set to expand by another 1.2 billion over the next ten years, and at the same time the stark income gap is expanding. Currently 40 percent of the poorest make up just 5 percent of the total income while three quarter’s of the world’s income is owned by a mere 20 percent of the World’s richest. Global poverty is another aspect that is directly related to not only climate change but other consumption habits, and in trying to solve the World’s environmental state we can aim to improve the living situations of those impoverished. Yet there are two ways we can have an effect on those barely getting by and dying, and even though being ethical consumers and directly cutting carbon emissions will help, it is worth nothing that our efforts may be better spent addressing their plight head on and that in turn will have a greater impact on the environment as well.

This is an interesting argument put up by Bjorn Lomborg, the man who organizes the Copenhagen Consensus and is one of the professors in the Copenhagen Business School, who says that instead of generating our budgets around the matters of climate change alone we should hone them on humanity causes. Lomborg recognizes that by cutting back on carbon emissions we can indirectly reduce the amount of those suffering from hunger, but if we spend our funds directly on Global poverty we can be 5,000 times more effective. Should the money be spent on climate changing matters alone with $180 billion until 2100 the hungry would be spared by 2 million during that time, yet if instead the money was spent in a way mapped out by the UN to attack hunger head on 229 million would be saved right now.
Read the rest of this entry »

OK. Before you read my blog, you gotta read yesterday’s (Sunday, December 6, 2009) Dilbert comic strip. Or rather, Dogbert The CEO.  No further explanation needed.

If I asked you “what do you do” could you tell me in about 45 words or less (Dilbert took 49)? What would you tell me? Would I understand the services you could deliver to me and the benefits I might anticipate from working with you?

I’m not talking about what you sell or the technical aspects of what it does. Features and benefits are irrelevant – even for highly engineering services. I am talking about what YOU are all about and what your delivery of your skill set brings to the table. Because that’s what the communication interface is all about, be it sales or engineering. People aren’t buying standardized products or services. If they were, they should be dealing with robots or worse yet, customer service reps.  Instead, they are making decisions about whether incorporating you and your company’s skill set will make a difference to the competitive viability of their company. Read the rest of this entry »