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Sunday, August 11, 2013

The Power of Praise: How your team gets your company to the next level

In the business world, the professional field of human resource management is mature with associations, university degree programs, systems, processes and established conventional wisdom. Professional coursework in human resources management could not be counted as the most riveting or electrifying subject one could attend. The professional results of these learned efforts certainly are what inspired the song lyrics: all in all, you’re just another brick in the wall. 

Amazing organizations are comprised of amazing people; the problem is that amazing people don’t come labeled as such. You have to find them and in order to do so; you have to look for them. Looking back across almost four decades in the cleaning industry from working in 25 different companies, I know the cleaning business is really the people business. 

But I didn’t always know that, I had to learn it. 

I remember at first recruiting, interviewing and hiring was a bit of a mystery to me and as you can imagine it didn’t go very well at all. Employees were a necessary evil and one of the big headaches in the cleaning business. Starting from that point of view employees then became warm bodies, a part of the cleaning equation and not as reliable as my other tools, such as upright vacuum cleaners. 

I recall having very pleasant daydreams of clean buildings without employees (which completely replaced childhood daydreams of being a pirate, but required the same amount of magic).

Slowly I learned the value of my own employees but it was not until I was working for a large cleaning company where cleaning staff were less expendable than upright vacuum cleaners that I began to develop a realistic working theory and then a strategy.

We hired large groups of workers all at once when a new contract was secured. I recall seeing one worker on his first day and I could have bet money he wouldn’t return for his second day of work. A ‘loser’, a complete zero in my mind and on the first night we were never very picky, we simply needed warm bodies.

He proved me wrong. Not only did he return on the second night for work but never missed a day and five years later he was appointed supervisor of one of those buildings. I was wrong about that man but what I could not see that first night was that he cared about what he was doing. Identifying people who care means you have to pay attention.