A few years ago, a group invited me to speak to their annual leadership conference in Europe, and they included my family on the trip. A month or so before our departure, my wife, Anne, told me about a lifelong dream to visit Portugal and wondered if we could stop in Lisbon on the way to the meeting. Our travel agent told her that our airfare would change only slightly, so I said somewhat distractedly, âFine with me.â Anne made the hotel arrangements, and I moved the departure date up on my calendar.
Just days before we left for our trip, the hotel confirmation arrived. I went into shock when I saw the exorbitant charge for our hotel stay in Portugal and asked Anne with visible irritation, âHow can we afford this? There is no way we have enough money to stay in that hotel.â Anne calmly explained that she was upset, too, but it was the only hotel that had space available. She then shared her plan to save money by bringing our food with us. Anne brought down the old blue suitcase from the attic and filled it with food for our four days in Portugal. At that point, it was too late to change our flights without a significant penalty, so we moved ahead with her plan.
After flying all night, Anne, our two sons, and I checked into the beautiful Hotel Estoril del Sol, a magnificent beachfront property in Lisbon and ate our first breakfast from the food Anne packed in the blue suitcase. I opened a miniature box of cereal with my Swiss Army knife and squirted it with room temperature milk from a small carton that needed no refrigeration. My father always described his two grandsons as âappetites with skin stretched over them,â and you could tell from the faces of our two sons that the Blue Suitcase Plan was not getting off to a good start! The view of the Atlantic Ocean was beautiful, but the breakfast was dreadful. Anne noted our grumpy moods and suggested we change clothes and begin our tour of Lisbon.
On the way down, our elevator stopped on the mezzanine level. As the doors parted, we looked straight into the hotel dining room. It looked like a spectacular movie set. With a backdrop of the bluest ocean I'd ever seen, linen-draped tables were laden with magnificent food. Large ice swans and flowers decorated the tables as pleasant servers attentively bustled around. What I noticed most, however, was how happy everyone in the dining room seemed to be. I knew the reason they were happyâthey were eating breakfast in that beautiful dining room!
Sensing trouble, Anne pulled my arm and led us down the stairs out into the bright Portuguese sunshine. After several hours of sightseeing, we stopped for lunch in a park with a shady bench overlooking the magnificent bay. Anne handed me a can of tuna fish with a pull top ring and some saltinesâour lunch. I felt grateful for her resourcefulness, but these types of meals went on for four days. Our boys bordered on hostility and aggression after being denied their normal caloric intake for that long. They were in that preadolescent growth phase when they ate constantly and only became taller.
The night before our departure, I stopped to check our bill with the front desk clerk. As I turned to leave, she said pleasantly, âMr. Irwin, may I make your breakfast reservation in the hotel dining room tomorrow morning before you leave for the airport?â Not understanding the comment, I turned and asked her to explain. âOf course, all of your meals are included in the room fee.â In a millisecond, it all became clear! The reason the hotel was so expensive was that our meals were included in the price of the room. We had just spent four days eating the most awful food I could remember, when we could have been eating in the beautiful hotel dining room with all the other happy guests. The bitter irony was that we had to leave for the airport the next morning before the restaurant opened, so we even missed the one meal that we still had coming!
In defense of my incredibly smart wife, Anne had asked about meals when she made the reservation. Something obviously was lost in the translation between the hotel and our travel agent.
Where Does Your Organization Eat?
It is always surprising to me how so many organizations eat out of the blue suitcase of mediocre performance when both the leaders and the workers themselves long to eat in the beautiful dining room of exceptional performance. What's the difference between those organizations that eat out of the suitcase versus in the dining room? While economic conditions and strategic decisions on how best to capitalize on market opportunities make a huge difference, ultimately, the performance of the people in the organization determine its fate.
We see some organizations with happy, motivated employees solving problems, delighting customers, and working hard to reach goals. We observe others with a dreadful culture of rude employees who transfer us to the wrong department, or when we call their 800 number for customer support, the person on the phone acts as if we were a complete idiot. When I call in for computer support, that depiction may be justifiedâI just don't want to be treated that way.
Engagement surveys should dishearten any of us who want our organizations to prosper. Gallup reported that 67% of workers are disengaged in the workplace. Even more disconcerting is that in the disengaged group, 17.2% are âactively disengaged,â1 meaning that they seek to work as little as possible.
We've watched Office Space and laughed at the scene where Bob, the consultant, interviews Peter, one of the workers at Initech.
| BOB SLYDELL: | Y'see, what we're trying to do here, we're just trying to get a feel for how people spend their day. So, if you would, would you just walk us through a typical day for you? |
| PETER: | Yeah. |
| BOB SLYDELL: | Great. |
| PETER: | Well, I generally come in at least 15 minutes late. I use the sidedoor, that way Lumbergh can't see me. Uh, and after that, I just sorta space out for about an hour. |
| BOB PORTER: | Space out? |
| PETER: | Yeah. I just stare at my desk but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd probably, say, in a given week, I probably do about 15 minutes of real, actual work.2 |
We laugh but also quietly wonder if Peter works for us. While Office Space seems farcical on its face, it also touches a nerve. The Gallup and other data suggest there are more Peters in the workplace than we might assume.
Many view their jobs as a penalty box between weekends. They find little to no hope that their work will ever provide more than a paycheck to pay some bills and to enable the pursuit of fulfillment elsewhere.
I frequently speak to groups of senior executives and often ask a question. âHow many of you feel that maybe not all, but many of the employees working in your organization are capable of making a higher contribution to the organization than they currently are?â It's rare when I do not get close to a 100% âyesâ to that question. I then ask a more difficult but related question. âIf they can make a higher contribution to your organization, then why aren't they?â What corporate leader, what parent, what coach doesn't want to release the extraordinary potential of the employees, players, students, or children under their influence? Isn't it a critical part of our job to figure this out?
The reality is that this challenge extends far beyond the corporate environment. What parent hasn't agonized over how to get a seemingly unmotivated child to care about school and their future? What teacher hasn't begun his or her career with the idealistic aspiration of stoking the flames of intrinsic motivation and transforming their lackluster students into talented academic performers? What coach hasn't longed to find the key to unlock a gifted but underperforming athlete's potential? Scout leaders, religious, and other community leaders and anyone who seeks to make a difference in others' lives wrestles with the question, âHow do I get another person to rise above the daily-ness of their lives to perform beyond what anyone thought possible?â
The age-old question for every organizationâhow do we bring out the best in those we are responsible for leading? How do we get them to care? How do we ensure productivity, quality, timeliness, and great attention to customers? How do we help them love their jobs? These represent the most pivotal questions that should keep any competent, conscientious leader awake at night. What makes this especially vexing rests in the reality that the answer to the above questions seems to vary widely among different employees.
Do we know anyone who says I want to go work today and see how badly I can screw up? Do we know anyone who says I really want to work for a firm...
