Don’t start with your employees – start with yourself first. One morale boosting video course I am glad I never deployed at work

Picture credit: Ralf Weiser

To this day Fish! is one of my favorite courses I am glad I never shared – with employees. Quite a few years ago there was a management video course making its rounds promising to energize your workforce. It was called Fish! Philosophy. My HR manager back then got the free marketing kit and with it came a video. This video is about boosting morale: If a crew of fish market selling folks in Seattle could have fun and tremendous success in sales and business overall so could everyone else.

Well, so far the philosophy. The cold and smelly work place is not for everyone to begin with. Doing this day in and out surely can make people drag, but here there were four key principles applying to the employees and as a result they and their customers had fun and the company (and employees too of course) enjoyed success:

• Choose my attitude
• Play at work – have fun
• Make someone’s day
• Be present

Except, I had a huge issue with this. Why would I ask my employees to watch this video and then go through the whole course and for them to start implementing this at a personal level? I did not find it fair for them to go first. They did not feel empowered and supported enough to start doing this within the context of their jobs. In short, this would have provided a short morale boost just to most likely back fire. Everyone has to embrace such ideas, starting with the leader-managers. And anyone in management had better live by it and demonstrate these principles every day.

That is why I vehemently bucked moving on forward with the whole program. To this day I am thankful that we never rolled this out. Instead I made it my personal agenda to start implementing these four easy thinks first. If you are a leader-manager, please make time for watching the video or for nothing else just ponder how you can start implementing the four key items above. Go make a start first and only then share it with others.

Ralf

PS: The Fish! video was filmed at a fish market in Seattle. The red haired and ponytailed gentleman seen selling fish moved to South East Pennsylvania and worked at the Downingtown Wegmann’s grocery store in the – wait for it – fish and meat department for a long time. That is where I met and spoke with him about his time in Seattle. Small world we live in.