[RKDinOKC]

When the founder of the company I work for was still alive he made a point of randomly walking up and just watching each employee doing their job. If you weren't doing it like he wanted he would jump in and politely get you to do it like he wanted bestowing the benefits of why he like doing it that way. Of you could convince him you were actually doing it a better way he was all for it. And If he liked what you were doing after several minutes of standing there in silence he would comment, "You are doing a great job, you can do that for me any time." And walk off. He would keep an eye on people that he had helped and catch them doing it right so he could complement them. He didn't do it very often and rare more than a couple of time per employee.

When he was doing this employees were fiercely loyal and had the attitude that they worked for HIM not THEM. If they didn't like something they blamed the specific manager that caused it. But will still go out of their way to get whatever job done the best they could in the situation.

When my brother took over managing the company I noticed the general attitudes of employees changing. They started referring to the problems and things done wrong by management as THEM instead of the specific manager and didn't have that fierce loyalty and personal association with the company. If something didn't seem right they didn't do anything extra to try to get the job done. I told my brother about it and he said that kind of stuff was a waste of time.

It really didn't take very much of the founder's time, yet it made a major difference in people, the pride they had in their job and quality and production the put out.