Every time I am on the road during the peak hours especially in the mornings, I wonder at the amazing rush of people and vehicles all heading towards one direction as if it is some sort of a religious sojourn. One which they must do devotedly for the salvation of their soul. The destination : Work.
Imagine how much our lives actually revolve around work and the office (where ever that is for you). We plan our entire life around this thing called work/office. We live our life guided and goaded by work at all it's inherent joys and tears. We spend hours working and we spend hours at home and at play talking about work. We bring back work to our homes. We take the 'burden' of work to our mosques, temples and churches. We cut short our hospital stay for work. We arrange our marriages to suit our work schedule. We agonize when things don;t go well at work. We live for(not to) WORK.
Yet, how many of us do it with a heart full of gladness? I am not talking about the gladness that we are lucky to have work and not living in Lesotho. I am referring to the feeling of gladness that we have a great work place to go to. I suppose the people at DiGi will feel that way. But for the vast majority of us, work is probably a dread. We would rather strike a Mega or 6/49 and retire!
But does it have to be that way? I would say no and there are two parties involved in taking work out of the dread zone : Us and our leaders. There are critical roles to be played by business leaders to make work a joy for their people and there are also many self directed responsibilities that we must taken on to make work a joyful part of our lives.
The many things that I write about in this blog are essentially to make the work place more inviting. I guess at the end of the day, that is the sole objective of every consultant/trainer regardless of the fancy titles we give ourselves and the work that we do for organizations. I remember when an employee of a company came up to me after my program one day and said that he is more positive now about his job as he can see the possibility that he can be happy in that organization. To this day I am not sure how he made the connection between Effective Leadership Skills and being happy at his work place! I thought I came down hard on their lack of initiative to be leaders as that was the message my client wanted me to emphasize. Anyway, whatever works right?
So, lets get happy now at work......while we wait for our 6/49!
Cheers.
