Opening the Scope of Employee Contribution

Wow.  Two months.  Sorry about that.  Things have been changing and I’ll be launching a new business shortly.

One of the major things I’m doing with this new business has to do with the way management recognizes and utilizes talent within an organization.

Some years ago, I took a summer job in a warehouse.  On the company totem pole, I was the pile of twigs gathered around the bottom – I was a seasonal picker.  It was my stated goal to aim for average performance numbers.  Not only was I not expected to excel, as seasonal help I wasn’t even asked to try.  It was my job to achieve mediocrity pulling widgets out of bins on shelves, and count them out in base-dozen (i.e., 3.11 in this notation meant three dozen and eleven), never having to count above the number twelve.  What if there were more than a gross of a given widget in an order, you ask?  Those were in cases, and the full cases were dealt with by those in higher positions.  Literally.  They used a forklift and other warehouse racing vehicles.

I counted these widgets in batches up to twelve at a time, and put them – neatly (packing them neatly was a requirement of the job) – in boxes.  Not rocket science.  Years earlier, I had an assignment in my computer engineering class to write a short program in FORTRAN 77 that would calculate the amount of rocket fuel required for a given payload, taking into consideration the calculus of the fuel being payload as well.  I don’t know if that quite qualified as rocket science, but I found it harder than counting out widgets in bundles of twelve.  We also played with lasers that year in a physics lab, and I kept seeing green dots for days afterward.  I won’t even get into why you shouldn’t down a large bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans before trying to program in Pascal.  But I digress.

The people for whom I worked that summer – my supervisor, the warehouse manager, the vice-president, etc. – saw that a college student working his shoulders more than his fingers for the first time in a while might be able to contribute something other than an acceptably accurate widget pick.  I don’t say “more than,” because there were those who were far more accomplished than I was at the widget picking.  They were faster, stronger, and able to achieve more profitable results.

Thought I was not very good at most aspects of my job (my accuracy, unlike every other metric of my work, was above average), the company did not waste opportunities to use my other skills just because they weren’t in my job description.  I was asked to join a committee to consider redesigning several major aspects of order processing.  Later, I was also asked to switch roles for an hour a day and assist the senior shippers with the final steps of order processing.

The committee discussions and variegation of my daily tasks made days more interesting for me.  For the company, they were capitalizing on the contribution potential of staff without pointless deference to titles.

Just because an employee has a job with certain assigned tasks for which he is responsible, it is nowhere mandated to limit the scope of that employee’s contribution to those tasks.

One question remains:  How did the wielders of power know that there were other ways in which I could contribute?  Open and active communication.  My supervisor was open to suggestion from anyone, any time.  The warehouse manager (my supervisor’s supervisor) initiated conversations when our lunches coincided.  The vice-president, when we was in the warehouse (which was often), chatted with us individually.

There was no one whose official position precluded them from consideration for other projects, and the management style included knowing each person as a discrete personality.