It's officially summer here and we've got both heat and flooding. Last year it was drought. Did someone mention climate change?

Now I'm at the bottom of the food chain again. I'm an employee, and it's actually not that bad. Cutting back to 40 hours was difficult, but I can probably adapt despite my age and experience. Being at the bottom of the org chart gives me an entirely different view.

Being an employee is simple: Show up, do what you are told, leave when your shift is done. Simple, not easy.

Employees want to keep their job. That means figuring out what your job is when no one can fully explain it. Sure, they'll explain the tasks involved, but they can't explain every instance when you have to react to things not going as planned. That's the challenge for management, teaching people to think like managers while getting paid by the hour.

It's especially hard to teach because the people who know how to do it can do it without thinking - it's ingrained in their subconscious. As a coach, the only way I've found to enable them to teach others is to get them to bring those activities back into their consciousness, to examine each action and figure out why it works to do it just that way. We usually discover it's because of all the past attempts to do it another way that just didn't work.

That's why good companies spend so much time and effort on training new employees, why they've created procedure manuals and are constantly trying to improve their quality. They are investing in new employees and want to see a return on that investment.

Employees understand that and want to contribute. What they really want is to know what the plan is for the day, to understand what they are expected to accomplish, and to have the right tools to do the job. Make the investment and your return should be better.

Some employees are on the front lines, some are in a support roll, some coach performance and some just measure results. The fact is, they are all one sales team and they win, or lose, as a team. Everyone who touches the process affects the results, so make sure you're working as a team. Have a clear goal and an effective strategy. It will make it much easier for each team member to work independently and for the team to accomplish more than the sum of the individual efforts.

I didn't learn what networking is until I turned 55. What I realized then is that it's something I should have learned in college. It's just as important in the corporate world as in the world of small business. The corporate world tends to value the relationships within your own group. It is up to each employee to reach out to their peers in other groups as well as those both up and down the food chain. The basic rule remains the same: People prefer to work with the people they know, like, and trust. Network.