Nurturing Growth

Environments are reflected by their inhabitants.

Any time you take the time to examine growth, you must also take into account the events and the situations surrounding whatever it is that you are focused on.

Children have an enormous capacity for learning. I see this in my own kids, and their ability to grasp and own an idea with very little explanation. The synapses are firing so quickly, and the interference is so low, that a child can process and commit to an idea much more quickly than an adult. Kids dont have the worries and stress that come with responsibility. This alone allows focus.

But a child can only learn that which is presented to him. Whatever it is that a child is subjected to becomes the norm, the way of doing things, of speaking, of behaving. Kids tend to be fantastic mirrors of the role models around them, because of the capacity, and desire, to focus on what is going on around the world that they live in.

Where this idea really becomes interesting though, is in the management of people.

Very rarely can the worker influence the growth of a supervisor. The idea of it counters most logical thought processes. More commonly, the worker is a product of the manager or supervisor. Highly productive people are generally motivated by highly productive bosses. Unfortunately, not-very productive people can also be reflections of highly productive bosses.

To illustrate this, examine the way in which you train a dog. If you want a dog to complete task x, you have to encourage that animal more and more specifically towards that task until he begins to understand. We have all been privy at one time or another to training a dog to recognize the boundaries of his yard. How is it done? Correct if you said that you walk him around the edges on a short leash, then a longer one, then a rope, then no rope, before finally letting him loose completely and calling him in if he gets too close to the edges. It never works if you just stand on the porch and scream at the dog every time he moves.

Teachers do this by the way. It is the tell me, show me, watch me theory. Whenever I am training somebody on a new process, it is this theory that I follow. I start by explaining the task at hand, then by working through the process a few times with the trainee, and finally by observing that person doing the job and offering constructive help.

This goes back to the kindergarten theory of management which I spoke of in another thread. When you start to deal with your people in the same manner that you might deal with a kindergartner, you begin to understand a relationship in which you are nurturing growth. This is not to say that you talk very slowly and specifically. This is more broad-based. A kindergartner will flourish if he is given opportunity to impress the teacher. If he is given a chance for success on his own. If he is able to attain something through his own success.

If you have a child, you know this. "clean up your bedroom and you can have a cookie" or "eat your brussel sprouts and you can have dessert"

It is the same with workers. I have yet to see a worker who was motivated by the fear of termination. Or who did a better job after being bawled out in public. I have never seen a person come to work committed to success the day after being told he was doing a poor job. Especially if that person didnt believe the assessment was accurate.

The ideal employee is as follows. Committed and excited about their job. Interested in what it is that they do for a living. Proud of the company that they work for. Feels valued in what they do. Believes that they can be successful in what they do, and that the success will generate more of the previous feelings. Is certain that the things that are expected of them are attainable. Notice that I did not say that the worker believes that they will be better paid.

We have all seen situations in which a person did not work out in one organization and yet was wildly successful in another. The person changed jobs, and was suddenly driven, motivated, interested, and successful. Unfortunately, we have all seen the opposite happen as well.

I believe that most of the time the change has to do with the supervisor more than the employee. My own experience has been as follows. If a person knows what is expected of them, believes that it is something that they can accomplish, and sees a benefit to doing so; they will be successful at it. Leave out any of the three, and they will fail. ten times out of ten.

If the person does not know what they are supposed to do, it isnt going to get done.

If they dont think they can do the job, or believe that too much is being asked, they arent going to do it.

And most of all, if that person does not think that getting it done will have a result, they wont get it done. Any time that a person gets to thinking that it doesnt matter what they do, because the result will not change, they will not take the extra steps that separate them from success.

So a person is the result of their own environment. An environment that encourages creativity will breed creative people. One that encourages stringent attention to structure and routine will create those folks. When you put a person in an environment, they become part of it.

When I talk to managers, one of the most common things that I hear is that their people are either afraid to make decisions, or that they make the wrong ones. It never fails to raise the question in my mind of consistency in that organization. I wander when i hear these things whether or not the worker has been walked around the yard, whether the leash has been lengthened gradually, and finally let go, and whether or not the worker has been called back from the boundary from time to time. More often I find that these organizations have very little structure or set ways of doing things. I find usually a situation in which people are turned loose on the job, and are only hemmed in when things get out of control.

In any case, one of the biggest things that any manager can do is make sure that the workers know and understand what it is that they are to do, that they are empowered to operate within that set of rules, and that they are comfortable with them.

Learning Every Day,
Greg