Do What You Saw.

So, it is very difficult to argue against the idea, that good work attitude and practices relates directly to good management. The teaching of skills and the correct guidance of labour is paramount to improving any work performance. It helps to have experienced good management before you yourself have to manage.  This was something I observed in my youth, but until I attained some years did not fully understand. Just as we are known to parrot the words of our teachers, parents and others, so are we copying much of their work ethic and behaviours. I gathered from my few actual conversations and experiences, that my father was raised in a fairly strict, and frugal, house. In regard to the frugal side, I recall hearing (from my mother) how his mother could spread butter on bread by, putting on a half pound and scraping off a pound. Then again, they had came through the war years of rationing and such so, it was not unexpected. That my father received punishment from his father and how he received that punishment was obvious (I had encountered these methods many times).
However in time I also saw what was wrong with the methods. Thus, in my own earlier experiences of parenting I tended to use my voice, rather than any physical contact, and have been told that I could be very scary in that way as well. The methods of my father were pretty much the methods of his father and that appeared to relate to the management practices of my father. He appeared to have learnt from those above him. He also appeared to have reached a peak at about the time I was entering high school. This may have been due to changes in ideas, methods and concepts and it may have been that my father did not wish to change his practices or that he did not understand the need to change. I had discussed this with him in later years, and while he had remained guarded in his responses, he suggested that he didn’t hold with some of the ideas. They were breaking with traditions (How I wished sometimes, he had broken with traditions, particularly with regard to dealing out punishments).
But there was no argument that he possessed his own ideas and attitudes to work ethics (and unfortunately leisure ethics, which my mother once said to me, may have been why he didn’t advance higher in his management role). He had his way, even if he didn’t necessarily encourage us as children in the most positive of ways for us to achieve to ‘his’ expectations. And back then, when reading George Orwells ‘Down and Out in London and Paris’ I saw a lot of similarities in those attitudes to work, particularly when times were hard, or situations desperate. Reading this wasn’t only introducing me to the ‘way of the kitchen’ as Richard the Sous-chef had suggested, but it was actually re-enforcing much of the required concepts towards setting out to achieving a goal, and, succeeding at it.
(Continued tomorrow)