They See You When You’re Sleeping…?

Whether Santa Claus comes to town or not, we can rest assured that from the moment we accept responsibility for leading our teams someone will ALWAYS be watching the example we set. Hopefully they won’t be watching when we actually are sleeping (because that’s creepy, even for Santa) but they'll definitely be watching if we’re asleep at the leadership wheel! It’s almost like they’re following the playbook Ray Stevens wrote in Santa Claus is Watching You when he said “So where's Rudolph - He's on a stakeout at your house. You can run, you can hide, but you can't get away. Got binoculars focused on you everyday.”

OK, so maybe the folk we’re leading aren’t on a stakeout or watching us with binoculars - but I promise you they’re paying attention…

Think back to what I shared before about my friend Terry. I mentioned the picture of him suiting up to roll through mud and water under a tank in freezing weather but I didn’t explain much about what I had observed personally… Since he was one of those northerners, he was already under more than a little bit of scrutiny from the old timers in the building. He quickly developed a reputation as a stickler for following the safety rules, mainly because he was willing to address anyone who wasn’t wearing gloves, ear plugs or safety glasses. I remember a time soon after he started when he was walking by the press I was running and he picked a metal slug up out of the aisle. One of the main reasons he did this was that those slugs could cut a chunk out of a forklift tire and that was a fairly significant expense throughout the facility. He also understood that he was setting an example for others in the area who saw him; if a manager was willing to pick a piece of scrap off the floor as they walked through, we didn’t have any reason for walking by it without picking it up…

Being the wise ass that I was at the time, I stopped him to point out that he had picked up the metal slug without putting on gloves. Rather than making excuses for why he didn’t have gloves on, he thanked me for bringing it to his attention. That was weird enough by itself but he went on to tell me that he’d make sure he did better moving forward. Interestingly enough, he followed through! I even remember seeing him use a shop ticket to pick up a piece of scrap on one of the few occasions he didn’t have a pair of gloves stuffed in his back pocket. Quite honestly, just seeing him start keeping those gloves in his pocket sent a pretty strong message, one that showed he wasn’t above following the rules and he was willing to meet the same expectations he had for everyone else…

If we want to be the leader who sets a good example for others in our organization, it will always take more than words! Our teams will always pay more attention to what we do than they do to what we say. But I certainly understand how tough it can be, especially when we’re responsible for a large team, to provide a visual example for everyone. That’s where I’ll tie this back to something else our friend Jeff Henderson shared in Know What You’re For, “Do for one what you wish you could do for everyone!” His point was that we may never be able to do everything we want to for each individual we serve but when we do what we can for who we can, word will spread quickly. When we hold one person accountable for choosing poor behaviors, others notice. When we do that while balancing candor with a bit of compassion, others will notice that too! And when we hold ourselves to even higher standards than we hold our teams to, we can develop a reputation for leading by example in our workplace!

But make no mistake, this won’t happen overnight so we’ll wrap this all up by addressing that…