_Care of Your Men._--Looking after your men's bodily welfare is an
interesting and important part of the leader's direct responsibilities.
I remember during the construction of one of the war training
cantonments asking a bright-looking mechanic, who was pretending
to be working at a steam heater at eleven o'clock one night, if he
thought he could do good work in such long hours as he was keeping.
"Certainly not, but I can make good pay." He was a decent-looking
American, so I asked him how he justified such a spirit in this time
of government need. "Because I am fed like a dog and lodged like one."
It was true--and the ignorance or worthlessness of that contractor
was thus squandering thousands of government dollars a day through
needlessly disaffected labor, and delaying the completion of necessary
accommodations for the soldiers. Such cases are common in every
activity.
Each job presents its own problems to be solved according to the
conditions. The big thing here is to realize that the welfare of his
men is an important consideration for the leader who expects them to
do good work. It would seem unnecessary to state that a man's mental
and physical fitness have so much to do with his accomplishment, and
yet so many bosses seem absolutely indifferent to a man's condition so
long as he is able to drag himself to his work. In reality it should
always be the first cause to investigate whenever any man shows a let
down in his performance. A man cannot keep up good work on an empty
or sour stomach, nor give continued careful attention to details if
some trouble is constantly obtruding on his field of consciousness.
This latter fact has cost many a good man an accident at his machine,
and the intelligent foreman, knowing that sore feelings, grievances
and mental troubles interfere with good performance, does all he can
to eliminate them. In not keeping your workers in the best possible
physical and mental condition, you are throwing away all kinds of
potential energy--running a six-cylinder engine that is skipping many
of the cylinders. How quickly the superintendent would get after a
foreman who did that with a machine, yet possibly never notice that
many of the human machines were as badly out of kilter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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