Two Managers, One Building

For a season of my career, I set up meeting rooms at a large hospital. Every room had to be ready, down to the last chair, before the first person walked through the door.

I worked days, and now and then I picked up a second shift. Same building. Same rooms. Same tables and chairs. Same work. Different supervisor.

That was the only difference, and it changed everything.

My day supervisor gave us a picture before we ever touched a chair. "When you walk in, on your left is a trash can. There are two food tables. Look straight ahead. There's a resource table, and beside it a water tower and another trash can. Turn and you'll see the screen. The room is set up in a U-shape. Forty chairs. At the far door, a water tower and a trash can." Then she handed it to us in writing.

We could see success before we built it. That left very little room for error. If a room was wrong, either you hadn't paid attention or you hadn't done the job.

When someone got it wrong, she told them, kindly and right away. "I appreciate everything you do here. The team really likes you, and I appreciate the extra shifts you pick up. But when it's time for your review, I don't want to talk about anything but the good things you've been doing. So I want you to know now: twenty chairs instead of forty isn't a mistake we can make more than once. Log it wherever you need to, and we're good to go."

No grudge. No lecture. Clear, caring and done.

Second shift ran differently. Nothing was written down. The instruction was, "Get with the two leads. They've got all the information." They were good people who liked to goof off, and those of us who came to work spent our time tracking them down just to learn which room and what setup. Rooms were late. Rooms were wrong. The complaints came in.

Then she gathered us up. "Come on now, you're making me look bad. You guys don't want to get me in trouble, do you? I don't want to hear more complaints."

She meant it. She wanted the complaints to stop. But nothing happened after that. Nobody had to log anything. The next night looked like the last one.

Same building. Same rooms. Same chairs. One shift got it right. The other got complaints.

Here is the part that stays with me.

Everyone knew. Moving around the hospital setting up rooms, we'd overhear the department managers and operations staff who booked them: "Have day shift set it up, or you'll be dealing with a mess." So they did.

The team doing the job well was handed more of it. The team that wasn't was handed less. And when day shift couldn't keep up, the answer was to hire more people for day shift, not to hold second shift accountable.

None of that showed up as a leadership problem. The requests were logged. The complaints were handled one at a time. The new hires showed up as headcount. As far as I ever knew, nobody lined the two shifts up side by side or asked who was leading them. Everyone just worked around it.

We could count the chairs in every room down to the last one. Nobody ever counted the difference between the two people leading those shifts.

Swap the chairs for sales calls, patient charts or job sites, and the two shifts for two departments in your own organization, and you've likely seen the same two leaders. I have, in organizations of every size and at every level.

The workaround looks like a solution. It is really the cost of a leader nobody measured, paid for in extra hires and by the people doing the job well.

* * *

The difference between your best leader and your worst is already in your numbers. It is just showing up anonymously.

So here is my question for you. Think of the best and the worst leader you have worked with. Write down one thing that was measurably different between them. Then ask whether your organization captures it today.

If it doesn't, most organizations are in the same place. Their best and worst leaders look identical on paper. That doesn't mean you have to stay there.