What is a Smartly Designed and Well Run Company?
Is your family important to you? Wouldn’t you like the means and way to support them in the best possible way? Is your inner well being important to you? Wouldn’t you be appreciative of a vehicle that will greatly enhance your opportunities to take care of yourself?
If you work for a smartly designed and well run company, you will be giving yourself an opportunity to provide the best care for your family and a means to take care of yourself as well.
For the sake of our discussion, if a company is operating with high profitability, yet the owner shows obvious disrespect towards coworkers and customers, it is not a well run company.
As at technician, just how in the world can you really tell if the company is smartly designed and run well? It starts with the owner and trickles down through management. At the core is what’s at the core of these people. Are they decent human beings working out honorable values in the workplace? You’ll notice that we attempt to explore this premise when we talk about the things quality managers do here at The Technician Shop. In subsequent posts we’ll attempt to reveal honorable values and talk about the humanistic things that quality managers are made out of. Today however, we are going to zero in on an invaluable resource that can show us what a smartly designed and well run company looks like.
I mentioned previously that if I recommend a book, it will be after I have given much care and consideration to its value to you, the technician. I so get that you do not want to get bogged down in books. I am thinking that your ability to provide for your family and the opportunity to take care of yourself are of great value to you. So, here’s a book that you need to get: HVAC Spells Wealth by Ron Smith.
Ron teaches contractors how to build a high quality and successful organization. Ron is from the HVAC business, so that’s what he writes about. But this book’s message applies to any type of residential and light commercial contractor.
Read HVAC Spells Wealth and learn how a well run company operates. Then compare it to yours. Ron’s book will also come in handy when choosing whether or not to accept employment from another contractor.
Do You Need to be Rewarded?
Aren’t people fascinating? Like your manager for instance, why does he do what he does? To answer this question and hopefully gain a more clear perspective into what a better manager does do, we are going into undercover mode. Leave weapons behind. We’ll pack an open mind and notebook as we venture into the world of management consultant Larry Childs. The intel we gather today is fascinating and will help in your personal development quest.
Today, Larry is trying to help managers figure out why you the technician, do what you do. This breaks down to expectations and rewards. Are you being positively rewarded for the type of behavior that your manager desires?
While we ponder that question, lets take a peek into the world of Bob, a highly successful technician. Bob understands what his manager needs and expects from him. Bob gathered this information by sitting down with his manager and asking him point blank. He then took notes. You know what makes Bob so special? The stuff Bob’s manager needs from him is less than what he needs from himself.
Bob does not need to be rewarded by his manager. But Bob needs a manager who rewards his staff for desired behavior and meeting expectations. This tells Bob that his manager is tuned in, front and center. A tuned in manager means he is in more of a position to help support Bob’s educational and developmental needs and to remove obstacles from his path and get him what he needs to get the job done.
Folks like Bob are a cut above. They are driven by inner excellence. We feel that everyone has the potential to be like Bob. Getting there is not an easy road to travel. A start is to take your manager’s expectations* and make them your own minimum requirement for a job well done.
Yes, people are interesting. And why they do what they do is downright fascinating. If you’re driven by the passion of inner excellence the why of what you do will be a great shining light for those who still need rewards to follow.
*Can a manager’s expectations be unrealistic? Sure. While you’ll need to deploy common sense here, a good gauge that your manager is on track is if a coworker like Bob has been there a while.
What’s Up With the Management Stuff Here?
You need to hook up your wagon to a manager who cares about you as a person, your personal development and a desire to see you advance – in whatever terms that you define advancement. You need to run from a manger who treats you like a number, who treats you a like a pack mule or doesn’t treat you any way at all. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.
The Gallup Corporation surveyed* over one million employees based upon the question: What do the most talented employees need from their workplace? Their finding: Talented employees need great managers. Another finding from this survey: People leave managers, not companies.
Hopefully the information that we provide here will help you to gauge your manager and his ability to care about you as a person, to care for your personal development and who has a desire to see you advance.
The bottom line is that you need a talented, effective and engaged manager to help with your development. If you do not find this person, well, you can print off this article and give it to his boss on your way out the door.
*Info from the book referenced in this post
The Immensity of the Sea
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and assign tasks…teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea…Antoine de Saint Exupéry
This statement represents the essence of good management. Your manager needs to teach you and your coworkers about the immensity of the sea. If he isn’t, don’t expect much concern from him for your career and personal development. He’s not that interested in engaging your passion and talent. Instead he’s just focused on getting more work done.
What is the Immensity of the Sea?
This is the part of work that engages your talents with your passion. It is the area of work where you get meaning from your efforts and your manager gets meaning from engaging you and reaps the reward of your efforts. Not only do you get the internal rewards and meaning associated with work well done, you get internal rewards from helping other people.
The ways in which you help others can be defined in countless ways. It might be the feeling they get when they look into their beautifully landscaped yard, it might be the relief they feel when their computer is back online, it might be the efficiencies they receive from a redesigned kitchen or it might be the relief felt when a plumbing system is working and raw sewage is no longer floating about in their house. Your customers are feeling very good about your efforts and you’re on cloud nine when they show their appreciation.
Your manager needs to guide you and your coworkers towards the immensity of the sea. For on your way there, your spirit and enagement will get more work done for him, more effectively than he could ever dream possible.
Are You Part of Something Important?
Paul Grunau, chief operating officer of the APi Group, Inc., tells owners and managers to Hold on Tightly to Top Employees in an article that he wrote for HVACR Business.
What Paul talks about is really just good, competent management. In these challenging economic times, Paul offers excellent advice to managers. The key for you the technician, is to use this information to help to understand if your company and its managers is heading in the right direction.
Go over and read Paul’s article at HVACR Business and then head on back.
Key Points
Communications – Look for management to explain the why behind cost cutting and how it pertains to you.
Involve key employees in the process – Does your company involve you in ways to help it run better? Does your manager listen to you and value your opinion?
Non-financial rewards – Does your manager thank you for your efforts? Are you praised in front of your coworkers?
Paul makes a statement that tells me he really understands the essence of running an organization a cut above the rest:
The reality is that your best employees are thankful that they have a job, but they will not be satisfied with just having a job -they want to be part of something important.
When your manager understands and takes the steps to help you be part of something important, you have something that money can’t buy and you probably wouldn’t even think of looking for another company.
In a radical, bizarre twist of irony, a person whom I am very close to and who works for a very large organization, was the victim this week of such incompetent management, that they couldn’t have crushed her (and her peers) morale anymore if they huddled up and diagrammed a play in the dirt to do it. Read about it here.
