Читать книгу The Faithful Manager: Using Your God Given Tools for Workplace Success - Anthony E Shaw - Страница 15

This book is my conversation with you along our journey. In this format we can’t be as interactive as in a face-to-face conversation but I’ve anticipated many of your workplace concerns so that we can talk. If you listen intently and with your heart as well as your mind, you can hear me listening to you. I’m not an MBA and this book isn’t my graduate thesis. It’s not filled with case studies or flowcharts. In this book I talk to you about human experience, yours, mine and many others’. It is my belief that you already have the tools to be a more successful manager. I can help you recognize and use them, as I have helped the managers with whom I’ve been privileged to work. Neither you nor I are mistake-proof managers. But we are fellow human beings, eager to do well while doing some good along the way.

What is a Best Practice?

Throughout this book I will be using this term. A best practice is a work method that has been observed and analyzed by professionals, that produces effective and efficient results consistently. In the workplace, everyone from the receptionist to the CEO uses best practices – best practices are the ways we get our work done that time and trial have shown us give the best cost effective results, easily and quickest. Most of the time, we don’t identify these methods as best practices and, significantly, we aren’t sharing them within the organization so that all of our colleagues are using them across the board. Best practices help us put our faith in motion successfully.

Being a successful manager is not unlike being a successful parent. People want to be loved but they also want to be led. Being a good parent means having patience, listening with empathy, being authentic, and helping your children find the right answers – not being paternalistic! No two parents do it the same way but when it works, it’s the best feeling in the world. And you learn something new each day!

We are all alive to make a difference in our own lives and the lives of others, especially those around us, our families, friends, colleagues, and the people we meet. Managers have the responsibility to lead in making a difference. As a manager, you have that purpose and that belonging in your workplace just like a parent has in a home. And that doesn’t mean to look down on the people who report to you – it means honoring your humble sense of your self and your reason for going to work.

This is best said by the poet David Whyte who consults and counsels managers on work as “a pilgrimage of identity,”

“Soul has to do with the way a human being belongs to their world, their work, or their human community. When there is little sense of belonging, there is little sense of soul.”

Jim Dowd, professor of organizational behavior at IMD in Lausanne Switzerland draws on Whyte’s work and reminds us that management is “not all about intellect; it’s not all about mastering data . . . It’s about bringing everything (you) have to work, so (you) can connect with others.”

You’re reading this book; you’ve made a choice to listen, connect and explore your belonging in the work world, how you look at yourself, how you treat others and how you care for your soul. This is a practical step and a leap of faith in your own humanity. You and I choose to be who we are at work. Let’s explore that choice together as we travel our paths.

Lesson:

“He who answers before listening – that is his folly and his shame.” Proverbs 18:13