How to have the underlings’ love?

 

Question:
Dear venerable, since I have my own business, I have to take care of many employees. I’d like to ask Luang Phaw what I shall do to have the underlings’ love.

  

Answer
by Venerable Dhattajeevo Bhikku 

 Actually it’s not difficult to take people’s love. First of all, we should have a capability to govern our own minds. How can we govern our minds? Governing our own minds means keeping our minds delightful all the time. If one can always keep his mind delightful, it wouldn’t be difficult for him to take people’s love.

 Let’s get back to the question how we can have the underlings’ love. We should pay attention to this word “underling”. There are many kinds and many words of the people under our control; for example, officer, worker, servant, or even slave, or even worse like flunky. Our ancestors didn’t use this word because it was counted as an insult, for example, the words “flunky” or “slave”. These words are such insults and don’t count people as humans.

But well…we should better give mercy to each other and be well aware that we all are human. That they live with us means they are assisting our works, so they can be counted as our physical strength, and we ourselves use the strength of our intelligence. Oh, well... It actually can be compared to left-right hands or front-back legs. It’s just the same.

To take our underlings’ love, the first thing we have to do is treating them with mercy. Since we love happiness, convenience and pleasure, others also love the same things, but their current statuses and their knowledge are not as good as ours, so they agree to be under our control. When they are under our control, we have to ask ourselves if we count them as human or not. If we think that they are human, but still only servants or workers who have nothing related to us, it’s also the same thing that we don’t count that they are human because their status is lower than us in our mind. “Hey you! Flunky! Slave!” If we call them like this, there is no relationship between us and them.

  But well. If we treat them like our own children or brothers and sisters, the relationship will be better. We can count them as our own children who get paid. Or if we count that they are employees, we still count that they are human and have human right just like us. The only different thing is they have less opportunity than us, so we should better give them chances and do not insult them, let’s think that they are helping our work and they are not slave or flunky, so now we know what we should think.

1. Give them mercy; i.e, teaching them how to work. If their knowledge is not as much as ours, we can teach them how to work. As soon as they know how to work, we can assign suitable work for them. This way, we will have the result of work and they will make money.

Not only that we should teach them how to work and assign them suitable work, we also should give them moralities. Why? Tell them they have inferior status in this life; but since they already know about morality, their status is not inferior anymore. If we can do like this, it can be counted that we already treat them like our own children or brothers or sisters.

Since we give them mercy, teach them how to work, assign them suitable job and teach them morality, when they are sick, we shouldn’t leave them alone, but heal them, i.e. give them compassion. To say easily, we assign them work when they are fine, and heal them when they are sick. No matter how sick they are, we wouldn’t leave them alone. It means we buy their love by our love.

3. Rejoice with them in their good fortunes. Whoever who is good at work, we have to support them for their better progress. Don’t support only the people from our own group or our own relatives even though they don’t have very good ability. Since this is work, we should promote the talent people. Don’t be confused between work and relatives. In this status, no matters the people are our relatives or not, they are held as our co-workers. Since they are our co-workers, don’t pay attention to the relationship they have with us, whoever who is talent should be promoted. This is how we rejoice in their good fortune and don’t stop their progressive future.

Meanwhile, for the people who are not very talented, we should still give them mercy since they already give themselves in our care. At least, if we can find the honesty and good behavior in their hearts, we shouldn’t leave them alone. By this way, we can take their love. On the other hand, if we control them with oppressing powers, we will have only work, and they will only make money, but we will not have their love. To have the love of each other, we should think that they are our own children, our brothers or sisters, and take good care of them for work and merit-making work in the future.