A Definite Purpose Grows

When I bid on, was offered, then accepted my first position off the shop floor in the manufacturing facility where I worked, it was mainly to move away from shift work and to have a shot at developing a different set of skills that may someday help me land a supervisory position. The move into behavior-based safety about a year later had a little bit to do with that same idea but was equally based in a realization that the process I had been involved with just wasn’t something that would stick around long term; the corporate mandated lean manufacturing initiative I was helping rollout hadn’t been received well by really anyone in the building and was shaping up to be yet another flavor of the month… I’d love to tell you about my altruistic motives for accepting the safety position - but I can’t! It was more about my own career survival initially. That said, it didn’t take long to realize that I really could play a role in helping reduce the likelihood of someone having a workplace injury. But I can’t say that was my definite purpose.

About two years into the behavior-based safety role, another facility within the company requested that I come to their site to train a few of their employees on what the team I was responsible for had been doing to achieve results. I was dumbfounded; why would anyone want a (barely) high school educated guy, just a few years removed from being a carpenter and press operator, to fly across the country to teach their employees anything? Never being one to say no to an opportunity, I hopped on what would become the first of many flights to support other sites throughout North America. I think this was the very beginning of me having a definite purpose. Let me be very clear here though, it still wasn’t all about safety. This was the time I saw how sharing tools I had learned to use even a little bit effectively could help others get better in their own roles.

Just a couple years after that initial trip, I accepted responsibility for officially supporting the rest of the company’s sites in the US, Canada, and Mexico that had an active behavior-based safety process. This wasn’t an actual change of positions though, I still held full responsibility for the process in my home facility. Since that process was designed to be driven by hourly employees, and the organization had a firm stance against hourly employees who weren’t directly involved in producing product getting overtime, I was limited to forty hours per week - to travel, to train in any of those other facilities, and to still get done all my other work that was a full time role by itself. Fortunately for me, I had a great team of other hourly team members who were actively involved in the process with me locally and I had three solid managers who helped grease the skids for it all to work out.

As I worked with each of those team members to divvy up pieces of my local responsibility so all we had worked to do wouldn’t completely die off in any given week I was traveling, I quickly realized an amazing but very unintended consequence. This was indeed helping our process stay strong despite me being out of the plant nearly fifty percent of the time some months, but it was also given each of the folks who jumped in to help an opportunity to develop their own skills and be recognized for that by the local management team.

Looking back, I believe this was my first taste of having a definite purpose to work toward. It also served as my first taste of what's nearly always required of anyone working to achieve a definite purpose. As Andrew Carnegie explained to Napoleon Hill why he most certainly could but would not be subsidizing the project he engaged Hill to complete, he shared “that the more successful men in all walks of life were, and had always been, men who followed the habit of rendering more service than that for which they were paid.” Carnegie went on to tell Hill “that subsidies of money, whether they be made to individuals or to groups of individuals, often do more injury than good.” The latter continues to prove itself true on a daily basis. The former point that ties right back to each of the folks supporting me in our local behavior-based safety process, and me too for that matter, so we’ll pick up there next time.