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| Volume 12 Issue 6 Fall 2005 |
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The Value of Good Will in Your Workforce
by James Terrell
The day will come when cartoons like Blondie and Dilbert will not be funny anymore. It may be hard to imagine that we will live to see the day when incompetent bosses no longer tyrannize their workers with ridiculous requests which only show how out of touch they are with the core business but that day is coming!
The global marketplace has been in the spotlight a great deal lately for the number of jobs which have been outsourced to foreign workforces who will complete the same tasks for less money. But the second tier of effects from this level of integration is that companies and business units who are not able to compete will also disappear. What counts as a competitive edge is being redefined on a daily basis.
Faster, cheaper, better made cassette recorders are not a good investment today because nobody wants them any more. The i-Pod was not a device that the music consumer marketplace was demanding. Someone on the cutting edge of computer technology realized what was possible and invented it (no doubt with a little help from their friends). It was so timely that it created a huge market overnight and once again saved Apple's aspirations.
"How can we get that sort of results from our people?" should be the number one question on the lips of every organization in America!
Answer: Build a durable spirit of Good Will in your workforce!!
The opposite of goodwill is distrust, a pervasive form of stress. Stress attacks three of the critical elements necessary for consistent high performance in your organization -- motivation, cooperation, and creativity. Everybody talks about stress, but what is it, really? Stress begins as an emotional disruption, it may be one that builds up gradually over time -- the proposed acquisition has taken over a year to complete, but now people are actually being laid off as the two organizations merge. Or it might appear with a sudden shock -- your senior leader has suffered a health crisis and the much younger manager who is filling in wants to make a name for himself, demanding that people meet what are completely unrealistic expectations. Stress tends to pollute the workplace with two kinds of destructive emotions: the most prevalent is a feeling of fear; the second is anger. When people feel unfairly treated and unable to control or correct the problem, they are not motivated to advance the interests of those who so plainly do not care about there's. When their future seems more uncertain part of the energy they used to get their job done is going to defend themselves psychologically. Trust erodes, the free flow of information becomes restricted, and cooperation weakens. The speed and accuracy of production falters.
If a climate of fear and anger as this negative and affect on normal productivity, imagine how it must affect creativity, research and design. The inspiration and new perspectives necessary to solve problems can only thrive in a trusting open emotional climate. Where the workplace is tense with fear and/or distrust, people will not imagine iPods, or tell you if they do! They will be more protective, more secretive, and pay much more attention to what they perceive to be there own personal interests, because it's plainly obvious to them that you do not care about them.
©2005, Collaborative Growth
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