mcdonaldland

There have been a number of experiments and historical events where people have been systematically excluded from the larger group. In some situations this meant that they were forced to forego privileges while in others it meant the extraction of their personal rights and freedoms. Regardless of the severity, case, and background, the results are always the same. The excluded group begins to resent the controlling party and the ‘elite’ group who have greater privileges and powers. This resentment boils and eventually simmers down to outright animosity and anger, which will eventually culminate in conflict. What applies on the world, social, and environmental stages applies equally to the business environment. When people are of equal rank, value, and position, they should all be treated uniformly. Always.

Take Steve R. Fictional for example. Steve is a middle manager who has a good track record, solid industry experience, and has been in the field for well over a decade. Over the past couple years Steve decided that he wanted to pursue more of a leadership track and moved from an employee to a manager role. He has done well so far in this role and has always achieved the tasks set in front of him. Steve is a good employee and a good manager and gets along with everyone. But Steve finds himself systematically excluded from meetings, team building exercises, and other functions. Attributing the exclusions to oversight Steve contacts people to make sure he is on the right mailing lists, that HR has been advised of his role, and so forth. Yet he is still excluded.

So now that we know Steve’s background, let’s take a look at what is going on with Steve. If he is like most people, which we will assume he is, Steve is beginning to feel devalued and cast aside. He is beginning to feel that he is the repeated target of lip service geared at simply appeasing him. He is thinking about moving on.

The attrition rate for a company will inevitably be higher when there are a lot of Steves. Likewise, it will inevitably be lower when there are few Steves. So the impending question is, how do you avoid Steves? The answer lies in equal treatment. Always. Treat all employees the same, all managers the same, all directors the same, and all executives the same. If people are categorized in the same way, regardless of whether it is by rank, title, status, or something else, they should be treated uniformly. If a directors meeting is held, all directors should be included. If a team building exercise is scheduled, all team members and the leader of the team should be included. No exceptions.

If you want your employees to be happy, productive, and lasting, make sure they feel like part of the group. If you want to watch them drop away one by one, systematically exclude them.

I am sincerely not a fan of Rodney Dangerfield however feel that his cliche utterance of, “I get no respect”, can find its place in modern society.

One of the best core values I have ever been a part of is: “Respect the individual”. This singular value is so encompassing that it allows the value set to be boiled down to a few distinct items. Respecting the individual, is simple and elegant, yet extremely effective. Show everyone the respect you want them to show you, no matter who they are. This doesn’t mean you can’t dislike people, get into arguments, or have long standing and deep rooted disagreements - it simply means that you are able to look past those enough to show a basic level of respect to the person.

This is such a good core value to me because it closely aligns with my personal values and reflects my upbringing. I was always taught that everyone has value and they should be treated as such. What pains me is that people so routinely neglect such a basic tenet of social life. People don’t pay attention while driving, endangering others. People cut in line at the grocery store. People yell into their cell phones in obviously and traditionally quiet places, like the library. People let doors swing shut behind them, with utter ignorance of the person right on their tail.

For the most part, people don’t respect one another. There are exceptions though. My wife is nine months pregnant right now. Three times out of her past four trips to the grocery store a complete stranger, who did not work for the store, stopped and helped her load either our 2 year old or our groceries into the car. This is more of what our society needs.

Do your society a favor: respect someone. Open or hold a door for someone. Get off the phone while you drive. Move out of the left lane if you are going slower than the people around you. Tell the person you’ll call them back when you are in a more appropriate place. There is no excuse for not helping others and showing a basic level of respect. Most respectful activities don’t take up any extra time or effort and the majority of the rest only take up a minimal amount of time - 30 seconds to help load groceries, 2 seconds to hold a door, etc.

Together we can change “I get no respect” to “I get respect”. After that we can hold hands and sing kum-ba-ya.

We recently decided that we were going to rip out our 4 foot high picket fence and replace it with a 6 foot privacy fence. The biggest challenge through the whole process lay in removing the concrete encased fence posts for the existing fence. If you have ever tried to remove an irregularly poured chunk of cement from the ground, you’ll be able to attest to the backbreaking difficulty in doing this with only a shovel and muscle. I really wasn’t looking forward to hours of arduous work so I decided to work smart instead of hard.

I decided to build a contraption to help me out and remove much of the physical exertion from the process.  The basic design (not fully depicted below) was using pressure treated 4×4’s so that I could reuse them for the new fence. The uprights are 8 feet tall, each foot is 4 feet long, and the top cross beam is 2 feet wide and the whole structure is held together with 1/2 inch lag bolts. I then placed a 1/2 inch eye bolt through the cross beam so that I could attach a come-along. Add a matching eye bolt in the fence post and I had a great way to wench the posts right out of the ground. I simply rocked the posts a bit to loosen them up then used the contraption to rip them out of the ground.

 
My contraption. I forgot to take the picture…

Turns out I was working smart, but not as smart as I could have been. I neglected to take the weight of the contraption into account and how I was going to move it from post to post. So I had this great mechanism that would save my back from the exertion of ripping out posts, only to strain my back by having to move it. I estimate it at around 100 pounds, which isn’t too bad in itself, however the unwieldy nature of such a large structure posed balance problems in addition to weight problems. Had I thought the entire process through, instead of focusing on just the main problem, I would have come up with a better design. Perhaps casters, handles, or even a bottom cross support so that I could use a dolly were in order.

The same paradigm rings true for business in general but it resonates especially loud in the software industry. We often design features, applications, and bug fixes with the intention of solving the problem at hand. While our approach may be smart in that it solves a large problem, keeps the problem from coming back, or takes into account the possible future needs, it isn’t always the smartest solution.

A great example comes from a small contracting business I once ran. Many of my clients wanted much of the same functionality as each other. So instead of rewriting or even copy and pasting code from one client to the next I decided to write a modular based system. This system was ant based and simply took a properties file as a build argument. The properties file would list the images to be generated for the site, the style sheets to use, the modules to be built, and even the scripts to run against the database during deployment. This system allowed me to write modules that were self referencing with respect to their dependencies. So I could drop in the users module and the client site would now have full support for user management, complete with authentication code. This users module would understand that it was dependent upon the security module and the security module was dependent upon the core module. All would then be included in the final build simply by including the users module.

The solution was smart. It kept me from duplicating a lot of work, but it wasn’t smarter. I finally realized a problem in that the system allowed no room for conflicting options. If client A and client B wanted different and conflicting things from the same module, which eventually happened, I was back to square one. In order to accommodate such disparities I would either need to copy and paste modules or build in very complex configuration functionality. Had I worked smarter from the beginning I could have foreseen some of these problems and taken steps to circumvent them. I won’t go into details on how, as most of them would require a deep understanding of the module based system’s inner workings. Instead, it is sufficient to note that there were other design options that would have yielded the same scalability without the technical nightmare of conflicting demands.

Always work smart. Strive to work smarter.