What every HR manager should know about eating elephants. Raj Singh, Founder and Director, Safety@Work, gives his take on key steps to helping staff to achieve business and personal success:
1. Believe
Staff all have extraordinary capabilities. They have the power of imagination and the ability to make things happen. They need to remember that thier capabilities are only limited by themselves. When we were younger, we could all imagine ourselves doing so many things. We would imagine driving in fast cars that we saw on the television and walking on the moon or flying a plane. What happened? We grew up and were stunted by what others think we should be doing. All of us are extraordinary and can achieve more if we believe in ourselves. HR should encourage staff to do the same.
For example, Roger Bannister—when he wanted to break the four-minute mile, everyone told him that he couldn’t do it; that it was impossible. Doctors and scientists said that the human body was not meant for that kind of stress or strain. Not only did Roger Bannister run the mile in less than four minutes, he allowed people to believe and imagine again. In the next weeks others followed suit and broke the four-minute mile time and time again. HR should encourage staff to be captains of their own lives. The impossible is possible if we chose to make it possible. So encourage staff to imagine what they want, define it, define it well and work towards these goals.
2. You get what you put in
You can aim for the sky. You can list goals after goals and write resolutions, however, nothing happens if you don’t realise your dreams. Think of a farmer, he cannot just sit at home and imagine that his field will one day be full of crops like rice or maize. He needs to be on the field. Then he needs tools. Every morning he has to get up before the sun rises and toil the land. After which he needs to plant seeds in the ground and cover them. He needs to water and nourish them. Only after many days or weeks does his hard work pay off, however, he still needs to do more. He needs to harvest his crops. And then start the process again.
Things don’t just happen. You and your staff make things happen. Sacks of rice do not just magically appear in the farmer's house. He had to work, he had to pour out his blood, sweat and tears. You should work with staff to help facilitate business and personal goals.
3. There are no failures, only feedback
With everything that we do we must learn. We must learn what worked and what did not. We must learn why it worked and why it did not. Einstein said this the best, “Doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result, that it is the definition of insanity.” In the same fashion, we can learn from baking a horrible cake. We put in a specified number of ingredients but the cake turns out horrible. What do we do? Should we call it a failure and give up or can we learn something from it? At the very least we learnt that if we add the same ingredients and do everything else in the same manner, we would bake another horrible cake. So, when trying again we should add or remove certain ingredients to help improve it the next time around.
In the same way, HR can help guide staff to learn how to improve thier work and homelife by learning from everything and understanding that everything they do, even when it goes wrong, still offers opportunities for feedback.
4. Eating elephants
Question
How do you eat an elephant?
Answer
One bite at a time.
Likewise, HR can demonstrate how staff will achieve success one-step at a time; do things in small steps. Rome was not built in a day. Change also happens in small steps. Just look at life. First we learn to crawl, and then stand, then walk with the help of our parents, finally we’re on our own. Yes, we may fall down at times. But when we were young, we used to pick ourselves up and after awhile, we will be happily going back to what we had planned to do. Simple isn’t it.
- Imagine—imagine what you want to achieve.
- You get what you put in—work to get to your answers.
- There are no failures only feedback—learn from everything.
- Eating an elephant—take small steps
Set goals, work to get to achieve them, learn from feedback and take positive small actions.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
