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Baraboo, WI |
July 27 |
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Rice Lake, WI |
July 28 |
Call Rebecca at 1-800-538-4595 for
any location. |
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“Your employees will never learn
to drive if you won't let go of
the wheel.”
—
Glenn
Shepard
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Dear Glenn,
How can I motivate an employee that doesn't want to work
that day, or really any day?
Lacy
Hines
Jessup, GA
Dear
Lacy,
That's an entire seminar in itself. Pick up a copy of
How to Motivate Unmotivated Employees.
Thanks for your question.
Glenn in Nashville, TN
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Glenn's Personal Blog
Click on the gold
pen to see what Glenn's on a
rant about now |
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One hot Sunday afternoon in 1978,
my dad drove me out to a deserted stretch of Spring Creek Road,
pulled over and said, “Take the wheel”.
I was 15 and this was the moment I
had dreamed of, but the next 60 seconds were more like a
nightmare.
I quickly learned that driving
that 1967 one-ton Chevy tow truck with a straight shift and no
power steering wasn’t as easy as it looked. I was humiliated
when Dad grabbed the wheel to steer us back to safety.
Eventually I mastered it and by 16,
I was towing in vehicles from all over South Georgia, freeing
Dad up to run his body shop.
Being a good manager is a lot like
teaching your kids how to drive.
The best managers help their
employees grow by allowing them to assume more responsibility.
Done correctly, this is a win-win because the employee increases
his job skills and earning capacity, and it frees the manager up
to focus on other things.
The problem is that you’ll never
know if your employee can handle something until you let them
take the wheel.
Sometimes the employee turns out
to be better or faster at the task than we are, and everyone
benefits.
But other times it’s a train
wreck, and we have to pick up the pieces afterwards.
To determine when it's okay to let
an employee take over a certain task, ask these questions:
1. Have I trained my employee well
enough?
2. What are the consequences if he
tries and fails?
3. What are the consequence if I
keep doing this myself?
4. Which is worse?
On one wall of my study hangs the
shirt I wore the first time I soloed in a Cessna 152. After I
landed at Atlanta’s Fulton County Airport, I marched
triumphantly to the control tower, gave my flight instructor a
big bear hug, and asked how I could thank him.
He responded, “By being the best
pilot you can be”. I went on to fly in competitions, and today
have two gold trophies with airplanes on them. One is for
precision landing (touching the plane down closest to a mark on
the runway), and the other is for a “Bomb Drop” (dropping a
small bag of white flour from the plane at 500 feet onto a
target on the ground).
Looking at them now, I can’t
fathom the amount of confidence a flight instructor must have in
his student to watch them solo for the first time. Fortunately
for managers, the potential consequences usually aren’t as
serious when we give our employees a chance to drive.
Over the 25 years I’ve been in
management, I’ve often found myself reluctant to let employees
take over certain tasks. But when I ask “What’s the worst that
can happen?” and think about what must have gone through my
flight instructor’s mind when he heard the air traffic
controller tell me “Cessna Three Four Quebec, you are cleared
for takeoff”, it puts things in perspective real fast.
To Your Success,
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comment
on today's issue.
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