Self Help

Have you ever heard the coaching given by personnel assistants as they help induct new employees into companies characterized by an authoritarian atmosphere? It goes something like this: “Around here you don’t have to be just a “yes” person. When the boss says no, you say no too!” Ouch!

If you and your organization are to prosper, followers need to receive more appropriate advice. Followers need to be encouraged to produce and prosper, both individually and as team members. If you produce well, will you automatically prosper? Not necessarily, but you will certainly increase the odds in your favor.

Among John F. Kennedy’s words, perhaps none received more universal support than “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” Similarly, employers of all types would probably subscribe to these
words: Ask not what the company can do for you. Ask what you can do for the company.

Product sales to customers and fees for services to clients provide the revenues from which employment dollars flow. In a free-enterprise society such as ours, the health of a company and its very survival that depends on its ability to generate revenues that exceed its total costs. This is not just theory or a managerial value judgment. It is a fact of life. Generating more revenue with a given level of resources or producing a certain level of revenue with a lower level of expenditures is what productivity is all about. It is the path to competitive strength, whether the competition is domestic or foreign.

Many factors influence a company’s productivity. Its physical plant and equipment play a role, and so do its people. All its people; managers, first-line supervisors, and operators, all contribute to the company’s productivity. It’s easy to waste a minute here and there, to arrive a few minutes late for work, to extend a coffee break by five or ten minutes, to leave a little early, to spend an excessive amount of time discussing last night’s football game, or to keep half a dozen of your associates waiting because you are late for a meeting.

But think of it this way: lf you were to waste (or cause others to waste) just an hour a day, your company would lose 250 hours per year, or more than 31 days! It’s rather easy to tell yourself that your own productivity doesn’t really matter, because your company is big and can afford to carry you in a less-than-fully-productive mode. But what if all the others who work with you feel the same way? If a hundred employees were to adopt your attitude, your company would be carrying one hundred payroll hours per day. In other words, it would be paying for the equivalent of twelve and a half employees who weren’t contributing to the health of the company. Hence its ability to provide better pay and more secure careers for those who were contributing would be hampered.