We were in a mailroom, we were in a war zone.
At this point in my career, I was promoted to Senior Clerk, which meant that I oversaw a team of six people in charge of mailroom operations, break and copy room supplies, conference room tidiness.
Because this was Chanel, the conference rooms had to look impeccable. Our little team needed to provide white glove service.
Unfortunately, our management thought that we were delinquent and didn’t do our jobs. A fact that they’d remind us of in screaming outbursts:
“What the hell are we supposed to do with you? You never check the break rooms. You never check the supply areas. Your team isn’t doing anything! This is bullshit Vlad!”
I wanted to curse and scream back. I wanted to meet fire with fire. Flame on, Johnny Storm.
Instead I did what any lower manager does when they’re lost: I called a meeting.
In that meeting, I learned three of the most important lessons of my career:
1 – Let people come up with creatively crazy ideas.
2 – Quantify, don’t criticize.
3 – Obstacles are opportunities, even when those obstacles are middle managers.
We were sitting in the conference room, fuming over the accusations, pissed that our bosses don’t recognize the work that we do. We knew that we were checking those rooms all of the time.
Then Anthony, a brilliant young mailroom clerk made a joke. Holding a little origami crane. He said, “what if we leave a paper crane in every room that we tidy?”
“…By the end of the day,” he continued, “we’ll know how many times it was checked by the number of paper cranes in each room.”
No, that’s silly and impossible, I thought, unless …
And then, a realization. This is genius! We should quantify how many times each room was checked and tidied. I ran off and got to work, keeping a little paper crane under my monitor for inspiration.
I created a digital version of Anthony’s idea. A phone number that the team could text from each room. A number that was connected to a scoreboard tracking which rooms are checked, and who led the team in tidiness.
This scoreboard was on every screen in the mailroom. It was a reminder, a count of the hard work that the team was doing.
It also became a friendly contest. Who would get the most checks? I’d even fund a monthly gift card to the winner with the most checks, worth 25 dollars (the most that I could afford at the time).
Soon the complaints became fewer and further apart, and management was forced to find other channels for their inadequacies.
Most importantly, I learned that the creative environment needs to be cultivated. Leadership is sometimes an exercise in prompting the right question, then shutting up.
Sometimes the crazy, impossible idea is just the concept before the production model that changes the world.
And sometimes, a screaming manager is exactly the problem that you need to get to that next level.
Soon, other departments got wind of my jerry-rigged dashboard. That dashboard became one of the biggest successes of my mailroom career, helping to springboard me to the next level in retail operations.
Recipe: A digital paper crane.
Ingredients:
* 1 Google Voice Number, free
* 1 Zapier Integration, free
* 1 Google sheet, free
* 4-5 hours of Google Sheets function writing
Directions:
Set up the Google Voice Number, and instruct the team to save it and text it every time they inspect a conference room, break room, copy room. In their message, they just text the name or number of the room. Done.
Have Zapier pull that information into a Google Sheet. One column is the phone number, the other colum is the text.
Create a new tab in that sheet: count how many conference rooms are checked, how many checks each person has. Learn some basic excel formulas to do it.
Quantify how many checks each conference room has. Create a realtime dashboard that the team and the managers see.
Shut your bosses up from ever saying, “you never do your job, you’re not checking the rooms.”
Et voila, get promoted because you’ve created your first digital crane.
Find your paper crane. Quantify, don’t complain.
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