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Little things

Cupcakes

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Welcome to my occasional musings about little things in life that make a big (happy) impact.

Today’s my birthday. So I brought three dozen gourmet cupcakes in six different flavors to work with me to share with my coworkers and friends. And I called everyone in my department to a “very important announcement,” and when everyone was gathered, with strange looks of nervous anticipation on their faces, I smiled a big smile, threw open the doors to the conference room, and bellowed with glee, “it’s my birthday, and we’re having cupcakes!”

For me, a birthday’s worth celebrating. And I’m worth celebrating. And if it’s your birthday, YOU’RE worth celebrating. And if you have to be at work on a beautiful summer Monday, few things make you feel better than walking around your whole building saying, like you own it, “It’s my birthday. And I brought cupcakes. And I’d love to share them with you. So come on down!”

And few things make other people feel better than cupcakes, too.

Leadership is

Inspire mediocrity by being a leader who changes everything on the first run, every time.

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Why it happens

As a leader, of course you want everything that emerges from your “locker room” to be perfect. After all, it reflects on your organization. And on you. And naturally, you want to help your team members become better at what they do, build stronger skills, and raise their expectations of themselves and others.

But there is a difference between making changes that need to be made, and making changes because something isn’t done/written/crafted the way you would have done it. Sure, in the world of human nature, you would do it better (and it might feel good to let others know that). But remember this – once you reach a leadership level, your job as a technician is done. Do you really want the burden of doing the work of every single member of your team, or do you want to train and empower them to take on more responsibility so that you can tend to the business of leading?

How it happens

When you are tempted to bring out the red pen, ask yourself these questions:

    1. Does the piece of work accomplish its goals?
    2. Does it reflect well on the institutional brand?
    3. Is it free of technical, grammatical, or factual errors?

If the answers to these questions are “no,” then red-pen away, for clearly, your team member needs to learn a few things about submitting quality work. But if the answers are “yes,” ask yourself a fourth question: Am I making these changes simply because I would have done this differently?

Don’t confuse improving a team member’s work with making their work like yours. The same brilliant thing can be said with different words; the same compelling piece of art can be created with different colors and lines; the same project can be accomplished successfully with different approaches.

What, exactly, happens

And when a leader consistently red-pens their team members’ work for taste preferences, they send these messages:

    • Your skills are not up to par.
    • I don’t trust or value your expertise.
    • The time and effort you’ve put into this was wasted.

The resulting mindset is this:  I don’t need to put together my very best for the first draft, because it will always be changed to whatever the boss wants anyway. And the outcome of that is: consistent mediocrity.

 

Little things

The Legacy of Helen M. Plummer

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Until this Monday, a lovely older lady worked at the CVS just off the University of Rhode Island campus. She worked long past any reasonably expected retirement age. Her gray-white frantic curls gave no impression, ever, of pretentiousness. Her name tag read “Nonni,” though few knew her real name until the URI student newspaper, The Good Five-Cent Cigar, wrote an article about her back in 2007. Although she was a little slow at the register, that was only to go out of her way to make sure you got your CVS Customer Care coupons. And no matter what, she ended every transaction with the same send-off –

“You have a excellent.”

The first time you hear it, you hesitate, waiting, to give her a chance to finish her sentence, never mind the quirky grammar. Excellent… what? Day? Afternoon? Weekend? Life? But you quickly learn that’s it. Just “you have a excellent.” Whatever you need to be excellent, may it be excellent.

My colleague tried hard to get the University to bestow an honorary degree on this woman, who passed her GED about 15 years ago with a college-level score, and who touched the lives of tens of thousands of our students in her 15 years at the CVS and before that the donut shop just across the parking lot. Students created a Facebook fan page for her called, Nonnie the cashier at CVS in the URI Emporium who says, “have a excellent.”

She’s recognized on the public bus system, her mode of transportation whenever her destination’s too far for her feet to walk. She’s gotten signed posters from the URI women’s basketball team and invitations to campus events from “her” students. She told The Cigar that she once had a book filled with the names of students for whom she prayed each night. She considered her job at CVS, giving her daily interaction with URI students, a gift from God.

On Monday of this week, Nonni didn’t show up to open the store. That never happens. The shift supervisor walked to her apartment above the Kingston laundromat and knocked on her door, but Nonni didn’t answer. Before the day was out, the Twitterverse was buzzing with heartfelt stories and sentiments and sympathies by students who adored her, at the sad news that she’d died that day. Even the big city newspaper in our state wrote about her.

I don’t know if she knew the impact she had on every person who ever walked into that CVS. I suppose we rarely know our own impact on others – good or bad. But I think if we aspire to reflect human kindness in the ways of people like Nonni, we can hardly go wrong. Helen M. Plummer, you have a excellent.