Initiate Initiative

I thought this article by Ben Stein was a good, short read.

Some of the reader's comments bring up good points too: you can't feed a family working retail, etc. But that's not his point. What I got out of it was be willing to work and learn and take initiative.

When I mentioned this to one friend, he wrote back about his experience: "The problem here is that when you take initiative, you get slapped down and reprimanded. When you don't take initiative, you get slapped down and reprimanded."

I think a problem with many company cultures is we don't foster people taking initiative. In fact we repress initiative and innovation with the following:

• people don't have the freedom to offer ideas w/o being signed up to do them
• teams that had nothing to do with the projects slow down are escalated or blamed
• initiative is verbally promoted but employees don't see any action to encourage it
• mindless tasks are given top priority/critical issue status while time isn't allocated for planning and execution

I have a friend who has seen all of this in his job as a web developer. We were emailing recently about some of this. Here is a guy that takes clients requests and translates them into websites with database back ends. He deals with 2 or 3 different computer languages a week. He has to know programming, database schemes, and server technology. Not only that but he is capable of planning out systems and willing to spend hours on end in analysis. So we were emailing back and forth for awhile when he wrote, "Sorry, I got to go. They want me to bold a word on the website right now!" [Poor guy.]

Whether you're a manager or an employee you have the ability to foster initiative. The question becomes in order to get people to take the initiative do we have to reward them? If so, is this really a healthy way to foster initiative, or just creating a bunch of mindless driver attitudes? What happened to doing something just because you want to do it?

One guy told me, "I love my work. I hate my job. " Another guy I talked to is a Product Manager for an eLearning company. He said, "In the end you're just someone's worker bee." On the one hand that's a sad attitude. On the other, it's true.

Maybe the point is to really enjoy what you do regardless of who else it benefits.

If there's something you want to do, you've got to take the initiative else you won't get to do it.

Do you feel you could do more in the 8+ hours you're at work?