Well, I don't know about you but I am getting a little concerned with the dummying down of humans in our society. The media, Internet, social networks, TV, and even the way we teach just seems scary to me these days. Who knows, maybe I am getting old and the last generation said that about my generation, worse, what if they were right, and I am now too? Ouch. Okay so, let's talk shall we?
Could it be that I am dummied down, because I don't feel like it, and yet I see this next generation as such, so maybe it's easier to observe in others, and yes, that would make sense because even the most conscientious of folks fail to look in their own mirrors often enough. Such intro-reflection is important for sound mind.
The other day I was reading the latest issue of Harvard Business Review and really, it could've been any issue of any year, they talk about this all the time, and have since the early 80s. What I am speaking to is the concept of employee empowerment.
This is the thought that rather than just training your employees to do a certain job, allow them to use a little discretionary decision-making now and again. After all, if they don't practice using their mind, they won't be able to when you need it most, and for a company to make a profit, you need everyone thinking the best they can, or do you?
Well, sometimes you don't want employees to think because you just want them to do what they've been told. After all if you have a perfect business model, you don't want anyone messing it up, you just want them to read the employee manual, go through the training, and then doing exactly how you have described, without deviation.
In doing this, you realize that you can keep a sense of order, and predictability in what is often a chaotic free market place. Nevertheless, in a relatively unstable set of situations as often occurs in business, it's impossible to make a rule for everything, or make every situation fit within a set of company guidelines.
So you have to empower your employees a little bit, but if we have a dummying down, which I do believe we have today, and if we have a large number of incompetent individuals with low IQ, or employees who don't care, one could ask why you'd ever want to empower them to do anything beyond exactly what you have told them to do. Therein lies the problem of trust.
If you don't trust your employees, they will know the difference, and they will fail to perform at optimum. Of course, this assumes that their optimum is good enough, because if they have too low of an IQ, chances are it isn't. I Hope you see my point, because we are talking about human beings here, and a rather troubling reality about the dummying down of our society. Please consider all this and think on it.
No comments:
Post a Comment