How to…..should I tell you?

 

Have you ever wanted to achieve something but didn’t know how to? or have to just wanted to know if the way you were doing something was correct? Now take these questions and put it into a corporate environment and you may see that it is a lot more difficult than one thinks.

There are many “How to….” books available in book stores or online, but they never quite seem to cover the topics required when you have just started at a new company or even when you are entrenched in the corporate culture of your current company. I wonder if this is a possible gap in the “How to…” strategy or a short comings in the corporate environments. Lets spend a little time investigating this topic and see if this is truly is a gap.

When you want to improve something in yourself, say like understanding why you do certain things or why you feel so glum at times, you seek out assistance. This assistance is normally in the form of a “Self Help” book. Once you have found the book relating to the help you are seeking, you normally read it cover to cover or just the chapters that seem to interest you and then you put the findings into practice. Sounds pretty normal to me.

Now you are in a corporate environment, sitting at your desk wondering if what you are doing is the correct way to do something or you are wondering …. I want to suggest a change to the company strategy or at least have some input. How do you go about this or how can you check that you are doing something correctly? I can go to my peers and ask their advice or even my boss, but who is to say the advice I receive is correct. The advice may be given with all good intentions and from an individuals perspective or it could just be the way they learnt how to do something. In many cases it is the old adage of “it has always been done like this”.

Yes, companies do have policies and procedures on how to do specific things. These normally only address compliance or governance aspects of the company and they culture of how they work. Why don’t the so called specialists in a company invest a little time finding out what the most asked questions by employees work is and create a library or “How to…” books. I know that I have spent many a day trying to figure out how to do something or even if I was doing it right, and my only reference points were my colleagues. Let me tell you that their answers were not always what I was looking for or landed me in hot water.

Do you think companies should invest in closing this gap of “How to….” or do you think that there is an opportunity for others to create such books for the corporate world?

Please let me know what you think about this or if you can relate any of your experiences regarding this topic.