Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Dan’s Biz Bookshelf: Pick Up the Gum Wrapper

Pick Up the Gum Wrapper: How to Create a Workplace That Increases Performance While Improving Lives

How do you promote an engaged workforce? How do make people feel excited about coming to work? How to you create an atmosphere of respect and cooperation in your company so you achieve “Worvana?” Keep reading to find out what I mean.

In Pick Up the Gum Wrapper, author Joe Bertotto defines three kinds of employees:

• The kind who pick up discarded gum wrappers: They continuously give their best efforts for the company and in the end for themselves.
• The kind who walk by the gum wrapper and not pick it up: They do what they need to do every day and not much more.
• The kind who actually throw the gum wrapper on the ground: Their attitude is, “I hate it here and would not be here if I did not have to.”

The most important thing that a good leader has to do is evaluate each type of persona and develop a plan to deal with each accordingly.

According to this book there are three components to building a productive culture and engaging everyone in the culture no matter what type of person they are at the get go.

From the book, here are the three components to building that culture:

1. Learn and appreciate and leverage each employee’s uniqueness. People want to be accepted and appreciate for who they are. Your way of dealing with them needs to be based on this premise.
2. Identify behavioral expectations. These are the kinds of commitments you make about how you’re going to work cooperatively and productively as a community of unique individuals.
3. Define leadership practices that are designed to build a workplace culture rooted in high care, high performance, and high accountability.

The author continues, “We are all unique. Each person has gifts they bring to the team. As a leader our goal is to understand, appreciate, and leverage those natural talents. The better we understand each type of employee, the better we will be able to manage them, inspire them, and encourage them to be the most productive and, yes, happy and fulfilled employees and people they can be.”

This is a good book on management. This is one you certainly need to read in these times of workforces made up of very unique and diverse individuals. By the way “Worvana” means Nirvana in the workforce.

Dan Beaulieu is president of D.B. Management Group. 

Pick Up the Gum Wrapper: How to Create a Workplace That Increases Performance While Improving Lives

Author: Joe Bertotto

Copyright: 2019

Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing

Pages: 252

Price: $16.99