I recently took my family out to eat
following my son’s high school graduation. It would have been a perfect
day…except for the screaming baby in the booth right behind us. The parents
hardly seemed to notice their baby, however. They ate and talked while their
baby screamed and threw food all around him. (From the smell, I am fairly
certain it needed to be changed, too!) How could these people not notice how
smelly and disturbing their baby was being to everyone in that
restaurant?
The truth is that they cannot see, hear or smell the baby
because it is THEIR baby. They see it every day. They smell it every day.
They have seen it throw much worse tantrums in the past. They are so close to
the baby that what it is doing right now doesn’t even seem that bad to them.
The baby has become “invisible”.
The same thing can happen in our
businesses. We work in the same building every day so we do not see the carpet
getting dirtier over time. We eat lunch in the same break room every day and
so we don’t even notice that the counters are getting stained and stickier each
day. We ride in the same trucks every day and so we do not see the drink cans
and candy wrappers that accumulate in them. In the course of our jobs, we have
all experienced a major crisis or two in the past and worked in some pretty
horrible conditions to fix a problem. As a public utility, we’ve seen things
that were vile and smelled things that would make you gag…so a small sewer spill
in someone’s yard doesn’t seem to be anything important. We are so close to
what we do every day that much of it, like that baby in the restaurant, has
become invisible to us.
To be great at what we do, we cannot allow our
“baby” to become invisible. We must force ourselves to open our eyes fresh and
new every day. We must look at our facilities, trucks, uniforms and worksites
the same way a customer does when they see them for the first time. To run the
kind of business we must be, we need to remember that the “baby” is ours. It
smells worse than we think it does. It’s louder and more obnoxious than we
think it is. If we try to ignore it, it’s only going to get worse. Our
“baby”…our company… needs to be changed… for the better. It’s OUR job to change
OUR baby.
When was the last time you checked on your
“baby”?
