Luke says Moo!

The Four Things Every Employee Wants to Know

From http://www.allthingsworkplace.com/2009/10/the-four-things-every-employee-wants-to-know.html:

1. What am I supposed to do?
2. Will you let me do it?
3. Will you help me when I need it?
4. Will you let me know how I’m doing?

And of course the best way to address these four questions: Keep it simple.

I read that very short article and it struck home. Those four questions can keep someone really very happy and those four questions define what needs to be done and clarifies how the end product will be measured. In those 4 questions ,and the short explanations given in the article, you can keep anyone happy doing what needs to be done.

Some times I’ve had the frustration of knowing what to do. In particular my company expresses wanting us to do “business development”. Well that’s a lot of things – and frankly I’m not well suited to going out and trying to talk someone into a contract unless I’m already in a business relationship with them and can help them determine the amount of help they can use from me. Business development is a murky and unknown item – I don’t like it. I don’t know “what I’m supposed to do” and I don’t understand what’s good business development. But I’m slowly learning to ask more questions and to express those questions in a way that helps my management understand that I don’t understand but am trying to figure out what is expected and what it is that’s necessary to keep things going. It’s not an easy process to figure out as I’m really uncertain how to handle some of these things.

Tomorrow I think I’m going to make those into a poster and slap it onto my cubical wall so I can remember to explain those things when I’m a task leader and to help remind me to create a culture that reinforces the positive aspects of being able to ask for help without judgement. Second, I’m going to use it to help me think of and ask better questions from my management so that I can excel at my given tasks. And lastly, I’m going to start applying it to my various Masonic activities – it’s very difficult to assign a level of “good” to the rather uncontrolled world of Masonry, but I think it’s possibly to use these questions to give us a better chance at empowering our members and growing as people and a group.

I keep posting articles I’ve read (I guess this is just day 3), but I’m going to start looking for something a little more creative. I may try to write some flash fiction or something like that. We’ll see what the rest of the week holds in terms of time available to write. Saturday will be interesting with the Scottish Rite Convocation.