Have Fun!
There is a very easy way to tell if your lodge is in trouble.
Listen to what is going on when you walk into the Lodge room.
A winning team or Lodge has a certain hum of success. People are happy with what they are doing and the conversation is upbeat. It is the same way you can tell who is winning in a football game. You do not have to see the score board just look at the sidelines. The winning team is all smiles, they are relaxed and telling jokes and the losing team is glum. Frustration is evident on their faces and in there muttered conversations. No one points fingers in a winning team but they always seem to look for someone to blame when they are losing.
If you feel that same feeling of frustration when you sit in your Lodge or attend a team meeting you know you have a problem.
I like what Erma Bombeck had to say about having fun: “Humor is a spontaneous, wonderful outburst that just comes. It’s unbridled, unplanned and it’s full of surprises.”
Now I don’t know about you but I like great uplifting surprises.
In Keep those volunteers Around Dr. Bill Wittich tells us that people who have fun at work are more enthusiastic workers, and enthusiasm leads to more productivity. That makes sense to me. I always find when I am enjoying what I am doing time seems to fly by. But heaven help me when I am stuck in a boring meeting like a stated meeting. It often feels like the meeting moves at the speed of Congress in Washington.
Too many Masters and their officers take even the smallest Lodge function as the most serious thing they can do, when in reality it would not warrant inclusion in the neighborhood fish-wrapper. If you are unfamiliar with the term, a fish-wrapper is the term real estate agents call their neighborhood newsletter. It contains recipes, jokes, and recent sales of houses. They send out to keep their name in front of people in their local area. It gets read once and then used to wrap up fish bones before they are thrown in the trash.
Recently our local Scottish Rite club traveled to Long Beach to take part in a Regional Reunion. One of our cast members, who like me is dyslexic, was very nervous before going on. He told me he was worried he would forget his lines. Once we were in the Green room with our costumes on and mikes in place I got him involved in doing a Monty Python routine which soon had everyone in the cast chuckling. We were still smiling when we walked on stage where the man who was so concerned about his like delivered a truly great performance.
David Thielen of Microsoft said it this way. “A cold sterile humorless workplace will never develop espirit de corps.” He tells the tale about a day when one team member went on vacation and that same afternoon the other members of the team received a copy of a new program, which at Microsoft is equivalent to going to Mecca. This poor person who went on vacation did not get his so the other team members put all their empty boxes from the software package in his office filling it from floor to ceiling. When he came back from vacation the office erupted in laughter and then everyone helped him get caught up as fast as possible.
Anyone who has ever flown on Southwest Airlines will tell you their flight attendants have a great sense of humor but that does not mean company fools around as a business. For an airline which provides no frills air travel they have one of the best reputations for getting things done. In the latest surge of fuel prices in 2008 Southwest did not increase their fares. Instead of increasing fares they began offering cheap flights. When the competition began to charge to check bags, they ran humorous ads on how bags fly free at Southwest. It is just one more example of using a little humor to achieve a serious goal.
It is important for every Lodge officer and team leader to understand that if they do not make the task fun for their team members they will not be able to keep them. It is even more important to remember that before you can hope to see them lighten up you must lighten up yourself. The attitude of a team manager sets the stage for the productivity of the team. Lee Iacocca used to say “The speed of the boss is the sped of the team” Bill Wittich adds “The laughter of the boss is the laughter of the team”. You don’t have to plan fun activities but you do need to let them happen and watch the productivity increase and the work load gets lighter.
All of which leads us back to the title of a song that was very popular a while ago “Don’t worry – be happy.” From How to retain Masons once they join the lodge.
Fraternally,
Jack Buta