Unseen & unheard

There was absolute chatter of birds, the noise that came from the bush approximately a half a kilometre away. Sitting by the wood pile that had been split, one felt a deep sense of another day coming to an end. I sat back in the old rocking chair that was positioned outside near the wood pile. There was a tremendous amount of noise coming from the near bush, then for a reason I could not see there would be absolute quiet. All of a sudden both of the dogs ears perked up and out of the bush flew a huge flock of small birds. They were so tightly woven together they seem to move as one organism, all keeping the exact distance of space in the meandering flight. There was no chirping amongst them in that flight all their attention was given to following some form of leadership unseen and unnoticeable.

To me that’s what real good leadership is, unseen and unnoticeable because everyone has a clear understanding of the objectives that bring about quality. There is no need to micromanage or use any sense of fear to control employees. Leadership is clear about what you are willing to do for people, and what you are not willing to do. Working together to discover the boundaries of roles. Creating an environment where people are willing to give you their creativity and commitment is an essential part of creating quality. Such an environment has its own intensity that only creative people whose heart is in the right place can create. This type of creativity is based on a group of people that are at the centre of the organization who are willing to self-evaluate what they do and how they think and not waste their time evaluating others. These people are the golden nugget of performance. They don’t waste time blaming, criticizing, humiliating, power tripping, or knowing what is best for others. These people have figured something out, and they don’t pay lip service to it!

They have figured out in order to produce quality and high performance, seamlessly is a matter of how well the people doing the work get along! Too often we HIRIE people who are high-performers and end up within only a few months losing all their motivation and no longer recognizable within their peer group. We are so willing to change or bring in people that are excellent at their jobs but don’t realize that the culture is the thing that creates excellence not the people. So, one has to examine what is culture? Culture is basically the relationship within the organization including people, tools, practices, procedures. The major question is how do these relationships between people tools practises and procedures satisfy needs or prevent people from satisfying needs? William Glasser clearly pointed out that human beings are driven to satisfy five basic needs. Loving and belonging, power, freedom, fun, and survival. In a nutshell loving and belonging is the relationship between people and the meaningful purposeful work they do. Meaning for purposeful work satisfies their need for power and the better the relationships that allow meaningful purposeful work to be accomplished more power people feel they have. That is truly the value of work. To feel that your work has meaning and purpose to yourself, others and your organization gives a person a good feeling. The basic need for freedom within performance is giving people the ability to satisfy their need for creativity or choices in how or what they do in their jobs. Their ability to reframe or create reference by discovering new ways to do work gives them freedom to spend their time doing other things perhaps working on more complicated problems at work. As human beings solving problems is being a human! Probably more than any other creature on the planet it is fun to be able to solve problems and move into and through challenges. Employers that allow problem solving through interdependence create an environment for their employees to inquire and explore to find momentary and long-term solutions. We all know the need for survival as we need an income to raise a family and have a lifestyle very deeply personal to us. When we are paid an honest wage with honest work, work can become a place you enjoy for the simple reason of need satisfaction! Glaser was 100% right, everything we do is to satisfy one or more of our basic needs! We can’t escape our humanity. The complexity of our brains is what makes us different from all the other creatures. This, complexity of satisfying these needs is the real force behind all we called motivation.