Email
PrintPredict a Future Worthy of Your Dreams
Is the future going to be bigger and better than the past? This is the question that people are preoccupied with today. When people believe that the future is going to be bigger and better than the past they become filled with hope, and this hope gives birth to enthusiasm and vitality. But when people don't believe that the future is going to be bigger and better than the past, they become seized with fear, and this fear leads to frustration, anger, resentment, victimhood, and a general lethargy toward life and work. Here in this very simple idea we find the most critical idea for our lives at this very moment in history.
The future (and there will be one despite all the fear mongering taking place) belongs to those who believe that it can be something more than the past. The role of every leader is to convince people that it will be. If a leader cannot convince people that the future is going to be bigger than the past they can’t expect them to follow.
All of life and business is a multiplication and a magnification of a relationship between two people. To best explore this idea, let us consider the relationship between an employee and their manager. Some employees are more engaged than others. There is of course a spectrum. Some employees (very few) are 100% engaged. Others are 85% engaged. Some still are 60% engaged. Others are 50%, 35%, and 15% engaged. Then you have a special category of people. I call these "quit and stay" employees. They quit, but they stay. You ask them, "How long have you worked here?" "Twenty years, " they reply. You inquire, "When did you quit?" "Sixteen years ago!" they confess if they’re being honest. They quit, but they stay. This level of disengagement is toxic to a team and poisonous to a bus
iness or a relationship. When we walk into a business as a customer we can sense a "quit and stay" members of staff from about 50 meters away.
Nothing affects the success of a business or personal relationship more than engagement.
In business, engagement has a direct impact on efficiency, customer intimacy, operational excellence, product leadership, absenteeism, turnover, and too many other aspects to name. Let us assume a workforce on average is 75% engaged. It is important to recognize that 75% would be a high level of engagement for a business. There would be very, very few workforces that are 75% engaged. So that means most businesses are flushing a minimum of 25% of the payroll down the toilet. And this is just the beginning of the cost. Imagine how your clients and customers get treated when an employee is in a place of disengagement? Imagine how he or she approaches work and efficiency when disengaged? And that is 25% of the time even for a great team or organization.
So what is the essential difference between someone highly engaged and one that is massively disengaged? Highly engaged individuals believe that their future is going to be bigger than their past, and they believe they have a say in the future. The disengaged don't believe these things. They don't believe that their future is going to be bigger than the past and they don't believe that they can influence that future. When people don’t have hope for the future they don’t have power in the present.
People disengage from work, but they also disengage from marriage, parenting, politics, economics, marriage, spiritual beliefs and life. Regardless of what someone has disengaged from the reasons are always the same. They either don’t believe that the future is going to be bigger than the past, or they don't believe that their involvement will make a difference.
This means that one of our most critical responsibilities is to foster engagement. How do we do it? The most important thing to remember throughout the process is that there is usually a direct relationship between a person’s level of engagement in his or her personal life and his or her level of engagement on the job. People who are highly disengaged in their own lives are probably not going to be highly engaged on the job
. It is simply unreasonable for us to expect somebody to do something in business that they are not willing to do for their own lives. If someone is disengaged in his life he is not going to highly engaged in his work. Contrary to popular business theory and practice, there is no great divide between our personal and professional lives. All things flow freely between both of these domains - especially our habits or mind and character. Those who are sluggish and lazy in their personal life are likely to be the same, and even more so, at work. Those who are passionate and purposeful in their lives are likely to be the same at work.
All great lives, families, businesses, and nations were built with the hope and belief that the future could be bigger and better than the past. This idea is an essential ingredient is the success of any venture… and yet, this idea is dying in our culture. The great majority of people are very reticent about the future. In the last year it has become increasingly difficult to convince people that the future is going to be bigger and better. The millenials that are now flowing into the workplace are the first generation not to believ
e that they will achieve and enjoy greater material success than their parents. Parents and grandparents seem universally concerned about the future their children and grandchild might experience or encounter. People are losing the belief that the future can be bigger than the past and this should cause us to pause and reflect, because the consequences are monstrous and largely unconsidered at this point.
Q: What country would all of the following descriptions apply? Richest in the world. Largest Military… Center of Global Business and Finance… Strongest Education System… Dominates Innovation and Invention… Currency used as Standard of Value… Highest Standard of Living.
A: England in 1900. Rome in 100A.D. and perhaps the United States sometime in the 1950s or 60s. But that was yesterday. The more important question is, what country will this be twenty years from now? Fifty years from now? One hundred years from now? While the idea that our future can be bigger than our past is waning in Britain and the United States, it is not a worldwide phenomenon. In China and India and you will discover that the overwhelming sense is that their future is going to be bigger than their past. These cultures are pregn
ant with hope and expectation that something wonderful is about to happen.
In many ways we have become fat, dumb, and lazy… while they are becoming lean, smart, and extremely hard working. If we do not awaken to this trend we will wake up ten years from now and wonder who ate our lunch.
So where do we start? What can we do about this? In a word, dream. We need to become people of possibility again. The difference between the engaged and the disengaged is that the engaged have a vision for the future. They have taken the time to dream a bigger and better future, and they are now passionately and purposefully working to enact that dream.
What are your dreams and what are you doing about them? Your dreams are not your dreams by accident. Your dreams are your dreams for a reason.
Perhaps you are wondering what dreams have to do with your team, business, or family. We are driven by our dreams, as managers, employees, customers, and human beings. It is impossible to manage an employee or a client without a sense of what their dreams are. People don’t come to work with you because they necessarily love your company; they love the
ir work, or love you as a manager and leader. Some or all of these may be true, but the primary reason people come to work is because they have dreams for themselves and their families, and they believe that by working at your company they will be in a better position to fulfill those dreams. When that stops being true for any of us we start to disengage.
So start exploring your dreams, and the dreams of the people around you. Start the conversation with your friends and family, your employees and colleagues, your customers and clients. I think you will be surprised how many people have stopped dreaming. But simply by starting the conversation you will encourage them to start again… and that is when our bigger and better future begins – when we dream!
Matthew Kelly is an internationally acclaimed speaker, author and consultant. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Dream Manager and the President of Floyd Consulting. Over the past decade he has spoken and consulted in more than 50 countries. To learn more visit: www.floydconsulting.com and www.thedreammanager.com.
