The drivers who deliver orders for a flower shop are critical employees. They often make or break a customer’s experience. The shop where my wife works had a long time driver who excelled at the role. He was always on time, was exceedingly careful with orders, and always very polite to customers. When orders were slow, he would help around the shop by sweeping, cleaning vases, or preparing flowers. The day before Valentine’s Day, the biggest day of the year for a flower shop, the INS came to the shop and led him out in handcuffs to be deported. In hopes of avoiding surprises like this the shop started advertising online instead of in the newspaper. The drivers hired from this pool were chronically late, rude to customers, often under the influence, and sat around the shop when orders were slow because “sweeping wasn’t in their job description.” After six horrible drivers, the shop went back to advertising in the newspaper. The last time I visited the shop there was a polite gentleman helping the floral designers prepare flowers before he went out on deliveries. [1]
What do you do when deliveries are slow? Do you sweep the floor or is that not in your job description?
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There is a guy on the corner of Grant and El Camino who holds a sign advertising Quizno’s Subs. I’m guessing he is paid under the table and it is less than minimum wage. Every time I pass him, he is dancing, swinging the sign in long arches, and waving as cars pass. He looks like he is having a blast. People honk and wave back. One of my neighbors even bought him a Christmas present last year. I always smile when I pass. I bet I’m not alone.
How many people with “better” jobs have as good a time at work? When is the last time you had an impact on as many people as he does in a day? Do you take as much pride in your work as he does?
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I was up at an OutCast PR “afterhours” party in San Francisco at Roe last month before the acquisition was announced. A reporter asked me what traits I looked for when hiring at Jotspot. I told her I looked for people who pick up the trash. Then she asked if I was drunk. I wasn’t [2]. In my experience you can roughly divide people into those who complain about the trash and those who pick up the trash. People who pick up the trash relish solving problems. They talk about ways to make sure the trash doesn’t accumulate. They pull people together to discuss options. They take action and feel responsibility for all aspects of the business. This is directly contrasted against those who just complain about the trash. They spend all their time pointing out the problems. They didn’t create the them, so it isn’t their responsibility to clean it up. They lament the faults of others and highlight problems that aren’t theirs. [3]
What do you find you spend more time doing? Pointing at trash or picking it up? [4]
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[1] The first driver was from Ecuador, the next six failures were young male citizens, the last was Hispanic. So I also should ask when this country lost its work ethic. Where did we get this false sense of entitlement? How did a country made of immigrants develop such a broken immigration policy? These are much harder questions to answer than those above.
[2] While I wasn’t drunk, it looks like Jonathan Hare might have been.
[3] Unfortunately it is extremely hard to identify this sense of responsibility and ownership in the interview process. Perhaps leave the candidate in a conference room filled with trash and see what they do?
[4] A related question is, when you leave a movie theater do you bring your trash with you or do you think that is somebody else’s responsibility?
Just have to comment on your question regarding trash at the movie theatre…I have always been of the belief that I am quite able of throwing out my own trash and that it is not the responsibility of the theatre workers to clean up after me. Joel (loving husband) on the other hand believed that this was part of their job. Not that he is a lazy person or feels it is beneath him, more so that he never really thought about throwing the trash away himself after all everyone else just left it behind? I am happy to say that after seven years together Joel now carries his trash our of the theatre and throws it in the garbage can rather than leaving it behind.
Sometimes all it takes for people to change is to show someone that there are other options in life than those they have known. Lead by example I always say :-)
Funny you should mention that. I had a similar experience with my friend Josh. About three days after I met him (back in 1996) we saw a movie and he was complaining about people who don’t pick up their trash when they leave the theater. “Who do they think is going to pick it up?” he said. That comment stuck with me and became something that represented people’s lack of ownership and responsibility. But you are totally right about showing people other options. That is a much more optimistic view of the world. :)
Given the omnipresent temple of empty Diet Pepsi cans on my desk, I’m a little reluctant to buy into the trash model. But my habits aside, the problem with picking up the trash is that it’s an easy problem. If you’re picking up the trash because you ran across some trash and you’re picking it up, great — but there are many people who will find solace in an easy problem like picking up the trash when there is more difficult work to do. That is, this model can easily yield an overpaid janitor — or less metaphorically, an engineer making six figures engaging themselves endlessly on lab maintenance or system administratration. But I certainly agree with the gist of what you’re saying, I would just phrase it somewhat differently: the two kinds of people are the ones who believe that the project can succeed even if they fail, and the ones who believe (or rather, know) that the project will fail if they fail. The trick is to find a group of people exclusively in the latter category — and then to find a problem large enough such that everyone is right in their belief. ;)
I like how you rephrased it and I can see how the metaphor can be misinterpreted. For me, there is a clear division between those that take responsibility for the success of the project and those that don’t. The latter usually end up complaining, the former end up problem solving. Trash to me doesn’t represent the small easy stuff — but instead the problems you encounter throughout the life of a project.