Today, I visited my bank in order to deposit a cheque for a due payment to a company. The procedure was quite simple but I thought of cross checking it with the teller so as to avoid cheque bouncing back. The teller being a fresh employee (I judged it from the face look and the communication approach) wasn’t sure about it. She called her manager for assistance. The manager, a nice ethical young man, elaborated the details about the form filling which I understood and thanked him for. However, I noticed that while the manager was explaining to me, the teller got busy in something else and didn’t pay attention to her manager and neither the manager asked her to listen vigilantly to understand the procedure.

Well, I completed my work in bank and pondered that the manger had taken the corrective methodology instead of preventive methodology. Hence, there is a big time chance that the teller would call her manager again in future and every time the manager would have to leave his desk, come to the teller point and explain the same procedure to more customers in future which he could have avoided by teaching the procedure to the ‘right person’, the teller. This extra work would cause disturbance in his routine work and waste his precious time needed to complete jobs which he had been primarily hired for!!!

This whole situation reminded me of a good quote which says, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for the day; Teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a life time" And this is why I said earlier, that the teller will ask her manager again (asking for the fish) because the manager didn’t teach her to ’catch the fish’.

So, my friend, this is where the power of being visionary and proactiveness come into play… that is to see the future now and make the right moves … and this is where Stephen Covey suggests us ‘to begin with the end in mind’.