Media Coverage

Featuring Rotarian Dick Olenych

Your Commitment is contagious. Pass it on.

Column by Dick Olenych, The Virginian-Pilot , 9/14/2008

Are you contagious?

This isn’t about the common cold, whopping cough or even scabies. It’s about cascading your commitment and passion to every person in your organization. Look around you. Are you fostering a healthy environment, or a Petri dish of senior staff competitiveness that infects the whole organization?

Is there exponential growth of the right behaviors to be competitive in a global marketplace, or is the organization a group of underachievers vying for their bosses’ attention?

For me it’s a culture thing.

It’s easy to get our inner circle motivated and focused on the cause, but it’s tremendously more difficult to cascade that inspiration through layer after layer of management to the employees, those individuals who make the difference - your people touching the customers.

These heroes of customer service are the ones who will make or break the bank.

It is tremendously difficult to be a leader, especially with today’s cutthroat boardroom mentality. The bottom-line business mentality is rampant: Cut everything no matter what the long-term effects are, in order to make the quarterly numbers.

But eventually every organization must realize that the top-level management needs to be contagious. There is no program more germane to building a highly effective company.

How else will an organization internalize the passion and commitment needed to have customers rave about their experience? Bland memos and numerous e-mails are not the answer.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you cannot get the people around you to share in your passion, your vision, please go and sit in a cubicle surrounded by Dilbert cartoons.

Being a leader is not a title. You are the conduit in which every person in your organization feels the energy, sees the vision and ignites the spark into something great.

Senior management must be obsessed with being leaders, stalwart individuals and environmentalists. They must create an environment conducive to cooperation, or the organization will be rancid with malice.

Wanting change isn’t a course of action. It’s a desire. While one may want change in an organization, action is needed. But it must be the right actions. These acts cannot be self-centric or a thin veil to disguise an ulterior motive.

At some point, we must put people in front of profits.

You cannot hope to have employees devoted to a cause if your senior staff is always jousting and jockeying for positions of power.

I admire heroes, those individuals who put others first. They are my kind of people.

At what point are you going to be the person whom others aspire to be? This isn’t about your title on door or your position in an organization. It’s about how you view others.

Years ago, at my first real job I had a manager. His name is Wayne. I like Wayne. When I grow up I want to be like Wayne. He is a great guy and a great leader.

Now, that’s being contagious!

Dick Olenych is the president of Spectrum Printing and the author of "Joe Sails." The author can be reached at dick@joesails.info.

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