Work ethic!

I was watching a clip of Newt addressing some group and what he was talking about and how he addressed it really caught my attention.  He asked the rhetorical question, "how do you teach children how to work?"  He went on to talk about at age five his grandfather paid him a dime for each errand he ran for him which taught him to earn, work ethic and how to save.

Ever since I saw that clip, I have found myself thinking about work ethic in myself, my family, and most importantly, my students and grandchildren; you know, our future!  Work ethic is one of those American traditions that supposedly made us great, once, but seems to have waned in the last generation or so.  At least that is what the media would have use believe but hey, we'll get back to that maybe! 

I guess a right first question is, how do you measure or assess work ethic in a person?  I would answer that, rightly or wrongly, on how strongly does the person really focus on the job to get done and then how efficiently and effectively the fruit of the labor turns out to be. I think that is a good avenue for this thesis; FOCUS ON THE WORK TO BE DONE!

As I look at my family which is my wife and our two children, I see very real, positive work ethic in how we approach work. Whether teaching, counseling, singing, preaching, cooking, cleaning house, etc. each of us in my family devote tremendous time, effort, energy and yes, FOCUS, to the work at hand.  As the patriarch, that makes me quite proud and I believe the DNA from my mother streams through her legacy as does my wife's father into her and to our children.  During my Goodyear nearly four decades, in reflection, hours or time of day or time zone were never a real thought for it was the work that drove me and for the most part, I loved it.  Goodyear, as a Company, breeds a heavy work ethic captured in the simple slogan, "Protect Our Good Name."  I believe that same slogan applies to my family for we seek to always "Protect Our Good Name" in all we seek to accomplish.  Yes, as the father, I am very proud of the work ethic I see in my children and their spouses.

But let me now spend a few lines on general observations of the vast array of students I have experienced now for approaching ten years of university teaching.  I speak a great deal about Pareto's 80/20 for that is an absolute reality.  Eighty percent will never create issues for they will get the work done as it should be.  Yet, the ever present twenty percent will create eighty percent of the issues and require eighty percent of leadership's time in trying to right the ship in moving the twenty percent to the eighty percent group.   In the twenty percent, normally very predictable at the launch, you find bad work ethic, poor study habits, difficulty in meshing into a team of peers, see no real reason to have to come to class, be on time and ready to go to work.  It is that same twenty percent that I now wonder, where did they or why did they not learn how to work?

Here is my point; work is learned behavior. I do think it is not a natural bent for Man but it is learned first by watching those around us as they work and some magical dust rubs off on you or not.  I saw my mother as an extremely hard working woman that sought to provide and to protect her children at all cost. I watched that. I emulated that. I programmed that into my hardware and at nearly six-four, I see the result of the magic dust still in me and my family  Further, when I look at the twenty percenters that come before me and watch the struggle within their assigned teams and in them as they feel the rough side of me due to their not being part of the team performance calculus, I more and more realize most if not all of them have not had a model or a template to watch and try to fit in to for this thing called work.

Do I think the world or Man needs a few twenty percenters tossed in for salt? Absolutely not.  What I realize more and more is that we, as a nation generally speaking, has lost the enjoyment of work and worse than that, we have lost a generation that have not seen role models and thus a pattern for them to seek to fit into as the years roll by. I see it every day and so do you if you think about it. So think about it!

My classes are not easy for they, all of them, are founded on a set of hard principles with the first one being, THE WORK WILL GET DONE WITH YOU OR WITHOUT YOU.  From that point on, the models, the work ethic, the desire to drive for the finish line, to constantly improve, to have no finish line and if it isn't broken; then break it mentality begin to fall into place. 



Work ethic is learned behavior!  Never forget that, please. There will no doubt be those that will disagree with my belief about poor performance but hey, it is my blog and that is my belief and my heart.