11 Jul Hope, the key wrench to life…
“Hope is the vital wrench in the toolbox of life, lose hope and you have no tools.” Buck 2005
This quote came to me while working on one of my first consulting projects. The morale was so bad that people were ready to give up and quit. It became to blatantly obvious to me that if I was going to succeed that I had to take steps to improve morale up to an including ensuring that they would get paid that week. Additionally, equipment was breaking down at an alarming rate with the biggest problem being tires. So we focused on the tires issues by training the drivers as well as the mechanics that perfectly good tires lose air and must be corrected at a minimum of every ninety (90) days. So once that issue was heading in the right direction we started focusing on some of the other issues without losing sight of the tire problem. We next focused on cleaning and organizing the shop in order to not only improve productivity and instill a sense of pride in the team. Things began to improve the stress started to subside and the morale escalated and the snowball effect took over and little by little everything began to improve to the point the employees had smiles on their faces and a sense of pride in what they were doing. Initially the shop didn’t even have hot water for the mechanics or employees to wash their hands. The improvement in cost, service and breakdowns was enough to warrant the installation of a water heater. Oddly enough, just installing a water heater raised the morale more than you can even imagine. As such, morale has a direct impact on employee productivity, which of course directly impacts the bottom line. As Jimmy V most famously stated “Don’t give up. Don’t ever give up.” There is always hope!
More leadership tips can be found on my elephant ear blog at https://mcbconsulting.com/blog/
For further inspirational tip on almost any subject you can always go to https://www.passiton.com
Thanks for listening.