Respect vs. duty: The Forgotten Power of Complicity

In any hierarchical relationship there is the a social contract in play.  You may ask “Why are you writing about this, Aaron?” and you’ll see that it makes a difference to your clients how your employees feel about their work and workplace.

This image comes to mind…

This whole thing is related to broken window theory.  The less you maintain your workplace the less people respect it, the more you maintain it the better people feel about being there.  As the owner of your business, you have to provide a number of things to your employees to make sure that they feel that they are respected and honoured individuals in the work place.  If you can manage this you will create something far more important than DWYL(do what you love).  Because people are far more interested in working at a place that respects them and treats them as honoured members of the team than they are in simply getting paid.  That doesn’t mean we can underpay workers it just means that once fair wages are in place we have to begin with aspiration management.  So I will argue that as both employee and employer, the most important feature of our personal self-respect is the ability to accomplish goals and advance our perception of what we think we should be doing.

So should you love your job? No, but you should be able to respect what you do and the people that you do it with and for.  When we get up in the morning and we look forward to working with our co-workers, because we have fun together, the world is a different place.

When we get up in the morning and you’re going to work with a gang of morons, it’s harder to get out of bed.  So choose people and employees based on whether you think that you can respect them.

Now I walk into two different businesses and here is what happens

1) respect absent:

There is tension in the environment and the people destined to serve the clients are under motivated.  They are there to collect their pay-cheque until they find another job.  I am disinterested to buy here because I become uncomfortable in the environment.

2) Respect present:

People are having fun and like to work with the people in their environment and feel more at ease working as a team.  I get better service and am at ease dealing with the people, because I am also being respected in the environment.

So the more effort you put into maintaining the excellent relations inside your company the better your client relations will be and the more your business will flourish.

Loss and moving on!

Freedom is the ultimate goal of many people and you know what…when we loose something we are freed from it.  Something wonderful was opened up when someone said, the stuff you own starts owning you.  The something is true in many relationships, places, attachements of any kind.  We are creatures of habit and it can be difficult to create a habit of change and growth.  One of the ultimate goals of many is to grow through out their entire life.

And sometimes we become fixed, we grow solid and sedimented into our relationships and we mourn them when they are lost.  But what we often forget is that we are suddenly invited by the world and life to reinvent something new to replace that lost content.  Life abhors a vacuum and we are able to invent anything that we can envision.  Life is wonderful for that.

When there is nothing we are before a kind of blank canvas, in our case that canvas is our life, our business, our relationships that we had before.  Now you have the opportunity to invent something, a style, a product, a new way of behaving that allow us to grow and create the world that we really want.

It may take great courage, or just great energy to break out of that mould that we find ourselves in.   However every body has that spark inside themselves, perhaps in your team or your very self.  The spark is always burning deep in our soul and it wants to create that freedom every day no matter how sure you are that your life is never going to change there is a way to open yourself up to growth and making something new….

So the next time you loose something or someone, remember the thing that you are feeling is not bad it is the vacuum that needs filling.  It is a call to action to make a better life for yourself, to create the thing you always wanted to do, have, be to take its place.

GO make something new…

Avoiding Conflict Management!

People don’t want to deal with conflict in a “healthy society.”

What are the greatest creators of innovation in the world? What things lead to industry and innovation like nothing else? Simple:

-Sex and
-War.

We have the internet thanks to the army and we use it thanks to sex.

Let me illustrate. In the 60s the army wanted to develop a system that would support a node based communications system that would decentralise communications to allow for people to stay in touch even if major centres were destroyed. So we inherited an interconnected network (internet) from the army…big deal.

As the internet became more accessible through universities and centres of education more and more people began to have access…and what better way to gain access to discreet material than anonymously over a digital system…gone we’re the plain brown paper envelops for personal material. It was a fiesta of access, but it was slow…. And so we’ve gotten faster access and even streaming video largely thanks to the investments of the adult entertainment industry….

What’s your point Aaron? Simple, the things that create movement that cause shifts towards progress are not clean. They’re dirty they make messes and they are things we are ashamed of and try and hide; because civilised people don’t talk about these things!

What got me started here was a training that I was quite pleased to attend with a group of social workers. During this session the trainer set out three circles, pictured above, and they asked what do you want to get better at, black beads for like, yellow for need.
Not one person selected conflict management! Not one! Social workers!

Conflict, or the difference of opinions, is the ultimate motivator. If you have a single winning fibre in your body somewhere there is the desire to be right and that desire is one to encourage, in the respect of others. An organisation that is able to encourage healthy competition or well managed conflict is going to be successful. And if they record their successes and their failures, (I’m going to use a bad word here) in other words “statistics” you will see the winning ideas not on the intern but by your clients. Because it has to be your clients that tell you which idea is the best not your team while they look deep inside their own belly buttons.

It is conflict and competition that allows us to try and risk new and better ideas with out this we get a society that plateaus. If you learn how to manage this in cultivating respect and fun we create innovative solutions and improvements from our profound and unending imaginations that need an outlet. The thing is this process isn’t safe…but it is fun!