Dreaming of flipping burgers? Maybe you dream of hanging off the back of a garbage truck the rest of your life. No matter where you end up after high school or a lay-off or a bankrupt business-- flipping burgers, picking up garbage, waiting tables, delivering pizzas-- for those of you not in your dream job these are just stops on the way to acheiving your dreams.
The Dream Manager by Matthew Kelly is a 2007 parable about a janitorial company that wanted to help their employees gain a sense of value about themselves while cleaning toilets. They achieved this by realizing that most of their employees weren't planning to clean toilets the rest of their lives and so they became interested in what it was their employees were dreaming about. In the parable, the janitorial company hired a dream manager to help employees articulate their dreams and develop plans to help them acheive them. Some of those dreams were accomplished while they worked at the company and some of them meant overtime preparing their employees for employment somewhere else.
Have you ever worked for a company that had your real dreams at heart? Or was the Dream Manager Program destined to fall by the wayside of every other management program to accomplish a company's bottom line. Kelly's story reminded me of my employer's IDP program, the Individual Development Plan. We were to write down our one year, 3-5 year, and 10 year goals and the tasks we needed to start doing to accomplish them. Our manager's would agree to help us anyway they could. Whether it meant time off, company resources, or other programs they could reasonably provide it was included when they signed off on our plan. But the program like most management programs came and went. Some individuals' goals were acheived, mostly by promotions they dreamed of, and these were spotlighted to justify the success of the program. However, the bottom line is that from the company's perspective the IDP only worked if it was career development within the employer's realm.
In the Dream Manager's Initiative, at Kelly's "dream company," employees' dreams were not limited in scope to that which they could acheive within the company. Resources were not limited by what the company or the employee could come up with. Everyone became aware of the dreams of co-workers and pooled their resources and seemingly impossible dreams were acheived.
The Dream Manager is an excellent read to inspire you to see what might happen if dreams are uncovered in the people around you: your co-workers, your employees, your spouses, your children, your neighbors, and your friends. At the back of the book, Kelly lays out a plan to start you dreaming and to reach out and begin dreaming with others. He shows how the Dream Initiative could be used in fast food, in schools, and in families.
1. Write down 100 dreams you have or have had.
2. Identify a timeframe for each dream of less than a year, one to five years, or greater than 5 years.
3. Write down what you can do over the next 3 to 6 months to accomplish each dream in the allotted timeframe.
4. Start a Dream Team by inviting 8 people (your children, co-workers, spouses, friends, familiy, neighbors) to write down their 100 dreams.
5. Meet with your Dream Team to talk about dreams. Allow enough time to share each dream of each member, identify their timeframes, and decide the 3-6 month tasks.
6. Brainstorm the resources in your group or that your group knows that would help each member acheive their 3-6 month tasks.
Kelly's book the Dream Manager will inspire you to see what can happen when we unleash our dreams. A dream affects everyone around us and every aspect of our lives. When you are pursuing a dream, your passion is evident to those you encounter. When you encourage others to pursue a dream, you energize their hopes and their passion for living. Small dreams are bridges to big dreams that lead us onward to the endless possibilities and opportunities to share our God-given unique talents and gifts with each other.
