Have you ever had a to get a family with a wide age range ready to go out the door? Maybe you were part of such a family.
This Sunday, my family, barring sickness, will get two adults and children ranging from 14 years to 11 months dressed, brushed, shoed, and out the door to get to church services.
Along the way, probably one of the adults will be ready to step out the door first, followed by the 14-year-old. At that point, the younger kids are likely to first notice that they can’t find their shoes, and one of them may have just realized that there’s a sewing project that HAS TO BE DONE RIGHT NOW!
For our two ready-to-go members, having got themselves ready, this may seem like a great time to pick up a book and start reading, or maybe it’ll be a good time to write an email.
When is a member of a family ready to go?
Yeah, I suppose that after 4 figures of times being told to, “put your shoes on the shoe rack when you’re done with them,” one might suppose that a latter half of the single digit years child might have start to remember to do so, but as a grown up, you know that’s not going to be the case.
Maybe you think, “well, I got ready, so I can take it easy.”
But then you have to ask yourself, what is my goal? Is it to get myself out the door, or are we trying to get the family out the door?
If it’s the former, then yeah, bathe in your superiority, and let the warmth of your awesomeness warm you as you walk down the street alone. Maybe you’re even part of a system that rewards you for being so awesome individually. You’re racking up all these completed tasks like no one else.
If it’s the latter, then help the children find their shoes. Help them brush their hair. Help them with the things they “should have” done. You may have to learn how they “organize” things, or maybe if you’re a balding man, you’ll need to learn about how your daughter dresses her hair. That’s fine because you exist in a greater context, and hey, you’ll learn something new.
And if there’s literally nothing you can do to help (e.g. you can’t eat breakfast for someone else), then you wait patiently so that when the others are ready, you are too. If you go and get busy with someone else, now you have to wait for everyone’s schedules to line up again. By that point, it might be Monday.
Take action
All analogies break down at some point, and businesses certainly aren’t families. But the point remains.
Ask yourself some hard questions:
- Does your organization get scared when individuals here are and there are idle from time to time?
- Is there anything about the way your company is organized that would punish someone for helping a colleague?
- What prevents them from getting the cross-training they need to help a teammate?
- Are you optimizing for ease of management or for work flowing?
- Are you optimizing for individual efficiency?
- Are promotions and bonuses based on individual action?
These will probably produce rockstars or ninjas, but they’ll fight against you delivering.
