Do you know where in the office the most rumors are put out? It's in the coffee kitchen! This is a place to gather in a company and you can learn a lot there. It is also the place where often mobbing starts. It is a place where employees feel kind of safe and not watched. There is a rule of thumb here: The worse the working atmosphere in the company the more frequented the coffee kitchens are. Management is always suspicious when watching employees gathering in small groups all over the place with their coffee mugs in their hands and chatting. But there is an amazing discovery made by observant consultants: The most crucial information you won't get at meetings or through meeting minutes. The most important pieces of information you get in the informal small talk, the kind of small talk taking place in the coffee kitchen. Yes, indeed, employees will talk about their private stuff too, but much more than that they will talk about the issues of the company. What is the biggest fear of the employees? It's the fear of losing their job! And the way many companies are managed is fostering that fear day by day by constantly talking about outsourcing and downsizing to bring the cost down. People living in fear are reacting based on that fear and so do employees in such situations. They hide and do everything possible to maintain their job, which is not necessarily the work they are supposed to do. One time an employee in a large company told me: "They pretend that they are paying me, so I pretend that I am working!" and I bet this was not the only one! When things are going wrong, very often Management starts to finger point to the employees blaming them for bad performance. Interesting enough in studies done by consultants it was proven that in 6 out of 10 cases it were the mistakes made by the Management, which led the company into crisis. But instead to take advantage of the enormous knowledge and know-how of the employees their proposals are rejected or just ignored. Reacting to that employees are becoming more frustrated and are holding back with their ideas. When I was talking to a top manager of a large corporation on the verge of filing bankruptcy about proposals, which could save the company in the long term I was told, "Do you have an idea how many proposals we are getting? Thousands of them especially from our employees and people like you. In Management we are far too busy to read through these proposals." Well, needless to say they filed for bankruptcy. But there is another side of the coin too and that is the second biggest fear employees have: The fear of change. Most human beings would do everything they can to avoid change in their lives. It has lot to do with our comfort zone and the boundaries of it. This is when the old bureaucratic rules apply: "I did it always this way!" or "I never did it that way!" Each and every change in your life is costing you a lot of energy because you are leaving your comfort zone. So employees are trying to avoid these changes at almost any cost thus driving their company even deeper into trouble. But change is in the air and it is so much needed, in society as well as in Human Beings. People must embrace Personal Growth and companies must allow for Personal Growth of their employees because your company will only grow to the same degree as the collective of your employees do. What it takes to succeed is Leadership, visionary leaders able to look beyond boundaries and limitations for new ways to follow instead of managing the problems. And it takes coaches to encourage, teach and guide them on how to unleash greatness and power in people. Walter H. Groth
Institute for Life and Career Transition |
