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March 2022 #14272 Page #66
How to Build Strong Employer/ Employee Relationships By Don Groom
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uilding a strong employer/employee relationship is probably one of the biggest challenges that leaders face in any organization. I have never met any manager or leader of any company who does not want to improve in this area. There are so many books, seminars, and other resource materials available to help guide a person to the correct approach to create the best employer/employee relationship as you possibly can in your organization, but the key to them all is working on it. My goal in this article is to share with you my story and how I have attempted to improve my relationship with the employees of every company I have managed over the last 35 years. No one is perfect in this area (certainly not me) and no one I have met has all the answers when it comes to this topic, but I trust that something I say in this article will help you in some way to improve your relationship with your employees.
What we learn when we’re younger I grew up in the late 1960s and 1970s in Texas. My mom and dad taught me to respect others and to respect my elders. My dad was a truck driver and my mom was a secretary, but the only thing I knew about my parents’ boss at work was that he was the boss and they did what he told them to do. The most I learned about being a boss as a kid was being cast as Ebenezer Scrooge in our 5th grade school play. My first management job was having my own work station at a truss plant. That was early 1984 at ABO in Mabank, Texas, and I was 19. I was a very driven person who wanted to have the best numbers every day in the plant – so I drove everyone who worked for me so hard for 8 to 10 hours that no one wanted to work at my station. I was able to do fairly well with my numbers and my quality, but I found myself retraining people all the time because every time anyone got the opportunity to get off my station, they took it quickly. After moving to Broken Arrow, Oklahoma in 1985 to attend the Rhema Bible Training Center, I started working for Rawick Manufacturing and quickly became the night shift foreman. My management tactics did not change much, however. I got the numbers, but I was doing almost everything myself because I felt that no one could do it as fast or as good as I could and, frankly, the employees could care less about my daily goals and they just wanted to get away from me as fast as they could. I could not understand it. Continued next page
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