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One day last week during the polar vortex I was just getting home and seen my son out there. I told him I was going to come out and do some shoveling to which he offered to help. I told him to let me put away the groceries then I would be out. While I was putting away the groceries the girls next door came out to shovel. I usually shovel for them and the neighbor on the other side of me. It's quite a bit of shoveling if you get a big dump of snow like we saw last week for several days but I enjoy shoveling, I enjoy it even more if it's not freezing cold out and last week it proved to push those limits, it just required a few more warm up breaks. A few minutes later when I went out there they, along with my son, had most of it done, I remarked they got that done fast and they lifted their shovels in the air and hollered, "yeah for team work". I could see by the expressions on their faces they were a bit bewildered by the lack of enthusiasm on my face over the utterance of such words. If there's two words that can trigger an emotional upheaval inside of me faster than saying mission statement I'd say team work definitely is it. Seeing the disappointed faces as if they had said something wrong as they walked back towards their houses I managed to calm my quivering body enough to utter thank you before I turned shaking like a wound up toy going across the porch uncontrollably back into my house.
Team work I've found is only as good as your weakest link. At least when it comes to work. From my experience most individuals performing manual labor don't go to work to find ways to get more work done but rather to find ways to get away with doing the least amount of work. It's that old cliche if they see you do it once they'll expect it of you all the time. One supervisor I had once joked that his biggest request from his employees was not to let me fill in for them when they went on vacation, well maybe except for time study. They though often did look at all the variables, no matter what the capacity of a machine you can't expect someone of senior age to ran at the capacity of a twenty year old but there were many jobs they knew they were being hoodwinked over the rate and regardless there had to be a better medium, often times they were right, they could hardly contain their glee upon me being assigned to jobs they had their suspicions about for years. Needless to say when it came to forming teams nobody wanted me on theirs. That's because variables do matter, no body wants to find a middle ground between the weakest and strongest link if that meant doing any more than they were normally doing to start with. That's the fallacy behind the term team work, it implies that people came together to find ways to work more efficiently who never considered working efficiently in their job descriptions to begin with. It sounds good, it may even look good but you know somethings wrong when nobody wants the strongest player on their team. The hardest I ever seen the weakest links work was trying to get rid of me. I admit I have always been a rather odd ball most my life, when it came to my job(s), had to declare that plural, like I said getting rid of me was the hardest thing I seen them work at, instead of being happy it was time to go home I'd leave worrying about how I could make something more productive the next day. In essence I was a work alcoholic. No matter how hard I tried sitting around in the bathroom smoking cigarettes and spreading gossip just didn't give me the same pump up I found standing before a piece of machinery like a Nascar driver ready to find out what this baby had behind it. Over the years I received a lot of accolades from many plant managers and supervisors but ultimately in the end it was always easier to get rid of one person then to fire a mass of people undermining your operation out of anger. Like always they knew it was a set up, "don't think we don't appreciate everything you've done for us", it's pretty evident they caved. It's always amazed me the amount of conniving people will do to get out of work.
So a couple more days into the polar vortex and relentless snowing I get a call from a friend early in the morning. He had just gotten home the day before from the hospital after suffering a heart attack, his second in less than six months, he said his nurse couldn't get there until late afternoon and wanted to know if I could come help him. I throw on some clothes and head out to help him and end up getting stuck at the end of my neighbors driveway which I use as a means to park in my yard. Which I don't like parking in my yard but that goes back to my fanaticism to work hard for better efficiency and convenience parking along the curb only to have to continually find myself warding off those enjoying the fruits of my labor without any effort or contribution towards such. I shouldn't have found myself embroiled in conflict and controversy by those who found it fit to break local zoning ordinance by having half a dozen or more people living in a house. That's another story though, the bottom line is it's just much easier to park in the yard. I am out there in sub zero freezing weather for over a hour trying to dig my way out of being stuck. Though traffic wasn't as high as it would have been on a normal day because of the driving conditions there were plenty of cars that passed me yet no offers from anyone to help. Finally I decide to go knock on the college guys door to see if anyone is around that could give me a push. No one answered. On my way back to my car I was going to go ask the girls if they wanted to try and push me out, they all weigh about a hundred pounds so I figured that at least added up to three hundred so it might be worth a try. Before I got over there one of them opened the door and asked if I wanted any help. The three of them came out to help me but pushing me out wasn't working. We stood there a minute as they came up with some creative ways to try and get the car unstuck when some guy stops and ask if we need help. At that moment, after being out there alone for over a hour I declared chivalry was dead, it has been taken over by what's in it for me. Not even out there for five minutes and someone comes to halt for some hot babes but no help for the middle aged lady. After some maneuvering we get my car unstuck. As I open my car door I am greeted with cheers of "yeah for team work", as froze as I was and as bad as I wanted to be unstuck I still couldn't get into that moment. If it wasn't for worrying about my friend to be quite frank I'd rather remained stuck then to hear those words. I'd rather spent the whole entire day meticulously removing every ounce of snow from underneath that car down to bare pavement then to sing that phrase. I looked over at them and told them, "I love you guys" and I do, I've been blessed with them as neighbors, they are some exceptionally wonderful girls, I could have gotten stuck with a whole lot worse after my neighbor of many years sold her house. If they moved out I highly doubt the landlord over there could find another group to meet the high bar of standards those girls live by. It's just a rare set of character to find in young adults these days. I get back into my car and as I am pulling off they start cleaning out the driveway, as a team, of course. In that regard, whatever lights your fire.
A few hours later I return. I can't even get in the driveway. They piled all the snow on the inside of both sides the driveway. Well that didn't make much sense. I guess if you just had to get up a bit of speed and drive straight in but backing out you have to be more cautious, you can't just hightail it out looking backwards trying to watch what's coming at you from two different directions, while making a turn that won't get you stuck yet still not lose control on a slippery road and hit a parked car....but I regressed, this was a team play, as such it didn't have to live up to the standards of a odd ball like me. Later I went out to removed the piles. I started on the pile in the street from the direction the plow would be coming from, I figured I could remove it now or I could remove it after he pushed it into the driveway. I then worked on carving back the pile sitting on the curb that had grown to over extend into the street. On the other side I removed any snow the plow could still manage to lodge into the driveway and left the rest along the roadside for him to push on down the road someplace. Now I was rest assured everyone was going to get in and out safely and with ease.
Team work, mission statements and Monday morning quarterbacking are all illustrator- y illusions of some sort of synchronized behind the scene energy. People aren't naturally energized at the prospects of going to work on Monday, the most quarterbacking I'd ever seen on a Monday morning was people drinking coffee while smoking cigarettes out on the back deck of the truck dock. The phrase team work is better left to those seeking to give it their all, a winner take all mentality, like you see in sports where they stole the phrase from. Employers should stop giving it a bad name and give it back. It takes a lot of dedication to commit your all, a lot of hard work, you earn that, it is never just a given for the sake of appearance's. There's no place in the work place for it, it doesn't exist, in a personal setting it's nothing more than compassionate people coming together to help each other out momentarily, that's what makes them winners, their compassion, you don't need a team for that, that comes from inside yourself. It's just something you would naturally do with or without anybody else's help.
There is if you're French ! 😀😀
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lol
The problem you describe is a result of a SYSTEM that relies on hourly pay and active supervision (which are both intrinsically problematic).
Active stake holders (employee owners) don't act like "clock watchers".
Blaming individuals for SYSTEMIC FAILURE is exactly why SYSTEMIC FAILURE persists.
Not exactly. In one scenario we were told we would all be taught to set up our machines, this is how I learned to be a die setter. The object was that if taught to set up your own machine would mean you worked through out the day on your own, meaning you came in and either ran out the job already in your machine or set up a job in your machine. You were responsible to keep yourself busy with less supervision and direction. As a result over time there would be less need for supervisory and middlemen involved in daily operations, reducing cost, increasing productivity with less downtime. In essence you'd come in in the morning and your department would hold a team meeting, as a team you were responsible how to figure out how to as a team make this "impossible" dream a reality...yes that should be possible dream but in the end all the same systemic failures still existed because, once again, the objectivity for the vast majority of individuals is to go to work and do as little as possible not be as efficient as possible. All this did was let those who thrived on downtime pussy foot around all the more, they didn't care that keeping a machine up and running more than sitting involved more money through piece rate...that's because they had already found a way around fooling time study into rating a job at it's least minimum rate production without being to overly obvious what they were up to. That enabled them to run the job at full capacity once time study walked away maximizing their profit level in half the time set by time study allowing them ample time to spent half their day fooling around on "downtime" while still maximizing their bottom line.
Sometimes when the economy would go south we'd be sent into other area's of the plant or to other plants to work. I was sent to the assembly area once. My job was to put the hardware on office furniture doors on what they called the door line. The parts would come down from the paint line, what they called a set up person would take them down and place them on slotted rakes and roll them over to me for hardware. The doors came down according to orders placed by customers so if a door came down with a bad paint job the set up person would order three more doors to replace that door as a just in case scenario that one of of those three, if not all three, came down in better shape than the door missing from the order. Of course reordering another door came with pushing that particular piece of furniture off line to wait if the expediter couldn't find another door that color or size in a mixed up hodgepodge of carts accumulated around me of what they called overstock...overstock came from all the extra doors ordered to replace a bad paint job, if a job was a rush job sometimes the line came to a halt waiting for the expediter to search through all those doors to find a replacement and for me to put on the hardware. So one day during our "team meeting" I said to them hey guys you know if I took these carts, sorted them out, put on the hardware and we stacked two carts on top of each other then mark each aisle I made with the paint number and door sizes then the expediter would only have to run over and look at what's stored where, pull the door needed and we could minimize the shut down of the lines and eliminate having to pull anything off line to wait. By the looks on their faces you'd thought they thought I'd lost my mind...."what you mean no extra coffee breaks, lounging out back on the picnic tables, etc., have you completely gone mad", they didn't want anything to do with it. I went ahead and set it up myself. I even got so good at it I could look up and see what was coming down bad and have it at the ready when the expediter came looking. I became the envy of the plant manager who once said to me "you know it's like you can see what's going to happen before it happens"...but on the other hand I was the most despised member on my team.
You know it's a complex set of reasons why nobody ever figured that out before, something so easy, but coming to work wondering how much lounge time comes with the day, or things like when I first got there and asked the foreman what the rate was on my job he replied we could discuss it after work become your main motivators for even wanting to go to work can be blinding to efficiency. The only reason I ask what the rates were for jobs is because I know how the game is played, if they say take these two pieces together and do this I know that was done at a snails pace, there were very few jobs I couldn't make rate within the first hour on and usually those jobs entailed setting large heavy case bottoms into weld beds for welding assembly, I could do it but I'd also end up with carpal tunnel syndrome within a couple weeks yanking those heavy parts in and out of the bed....some things I have to admit are better suited for men.
You know how that round about came to be about?....it's not because teams work together more efficiently, it's because of odd balls like me who can't stop thinking about how to make something more efficient, it lays on their mind morning, noon and night. They are not the "normal" in the lot, they are the exception. I can't even tell you how many times I got pulled for hot jobs with airplanes waiting at the airport for the parts. That's because I understood the concept of how jobs got their rates...with the lease efficient most befuddled way to do it...once you figured that out it was like gold for the taking. You know you could ask most people I ever worked about and they'd tell you how much they hated me but on the other hand they'd have to admit when it came to efficiency I was bad to the bone.
You were fighting a system that incentivized inefficiency.
That's why you felt like an "odd ball".
Simply giving people "less supervision" does not equal "autonomy" (or "self-managed-teams").
HOLACRACY is a completely different system which incentivizes efficiency and innovation.
....to the same few with the same underlying dogma's.
Awesome vid.
HOLACRACY gives ALL members direct and meaningful organizational input.