{"id":64,"date":"2011-08-21T19:03:14","date_gmt":"2011-08-21T23:03:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/leadership\/?p=64"},"modified":"2015-03-23T14:39:42","modified_gmt":"2015-03-23T18:39:42","slug":"the-horse-and-the-groom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leadership\/the-horse-and-the-groom\/","title":{"rendered":"The Horse and the Groom"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>A GROOM used to spend whole days in currycombing and rubbing down his Horse, but at the same time stole his oats and sold them for\u00a0his own profit. &#8220;Alas!&#8221; said the Horse, &#8220;if you really wish me to be in good condition, you should groom me less, and feed me more.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This Aesop&#8217;s fable describes exactly what happens when someone with poor management skills gets put in charge of an organization. It is easy to create the illusion of care while depriving people of the very things they need to grow and stay strong.<\/p>\n<p>There was an organization that I once worked with where the maintenance department had monthly breakfasts. This involved about 25 employees from the department and was generally handled pretty frugally so the cost per person was fairly low. \u00a0Management launched two initiatives. The first was to cut costs and the second was to create a better sense of teamwork in the organization. They did this by cutting the budget for the maintenance department breakfasts and starting monthly team building dinners for the\u00a0executives.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know if the team building dinners helped the managers, but I do know that the cost in morale and productivity was much greater than any savings that came by canceling the breakfasts for the maintenance workers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A GROOM used to spend whole days in currycombing and rubbing down his Horse, but at the same time stole his oats and sold them for\u00a0his own profit. &#8220;Alas!&#8221; said the Horse, &#8220;if you really wish me to be in good condition, you should groom me less, and feed me more.&#8221; This Aesop&#8217;s fable describes [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions\/69"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}