Employee loyalty begins with employer loyalty. Your employees should know that if they do the job they were hired to do with a reasonable amount of competence and efficiency, you will support them.
Harvey MackayRead
A mediocre person tells. A good person explains. A superior person demonstrates. A great person inspires others to see for themselves.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the different levels of influence people can have in communication and motivation.
Harvey Mackay's quote illustrates a hierarchy of communication effectiveness, where a mediocre person merely states information, a good person provides explanations, a superior person shows through demonstration, and a great person inspires others to recognize truths themselves. This progression highlights the value of inspiring others rather than just instructing, pointing towards the importance of empowering individuals to discover and understand on their own.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a leadership workshop to highlight effective communication.
Employee loyalty begins with employer loyalty. Your employees should know that if they do the job they were hired to do with a reasonable amount of competence and efficiency, you will support them.
Most fears of rejection rest on the desire for approval from other people. Don't base your self-esteem on their opinions.
Don't equate activity with efficiency. You are paying your key people to see the big picture. Don't let them get bogged down in a lot of meaningless meetings and paper shuffling. Announce a Friday afternoon off once in a while. Cancel a Monday morning meeting or two. Tell the cast of characters you'd like them to spend the amount of time normally spent preparing for attending the meeting at their desks, simply thinking about an original idea.
It's only lonely at the top if you forget all the people you met along the way and fail to acknowledge their contributions to your success.
A dream is just a dream. A goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline.
Don't wait for a funeral to pay a compliment. You may not make it in time.
A manager gets in the Hall of Fame by what his players have done for him.
Too often, when you are close to people in power, you're trying to make them happy; you're trying to tell them what they want to hear. But I find that really good leaders don't want that. They want the truth. And you do them a service, and yourself a service, by just being honest and straightforward.
When you're an engineer, you want to analyze things a lot. But if you believe that the most important data points are people, then you have to make conclusions in relatively short order. Because you want to push the people who are doing great. And you want to either develop the people who are not or, in a worst case, they need to be somewhere else.
Unjust attacks on public men do them more good than unmerited praise.
All too often, legacy management practices reflexively perpetuate the past - by over-weighting the views of long-tenured executives, by valuing conformance more highly than creativity and by turning tired industry nostrums into sacred truths.
Great ambition, the desire of real superiority, of leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and speech is the great instrument of ambition.
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