Episode Transcript

Hey what’s up? What’s up? What’s up, everybody? Welcome to THE a.m guys. Welcome to Five minute rants. I’m your host, Michael Abernathy. And welcome to the show predicated on the journey of life and business. So today, everybody, I wanted to talk about What I call the shed effect.

And I’m going to start with a story. So I used to have a job in high school, I was a landscaper, and did a lot of landscaping, and was outside all the time. And I eventually end up becoming a manager at this job. And there was a shed that I had organized, and that had to be kept organized. Well, not I had organized it. But there was a shed that must be organized for all the tools, all the equipment, and a lot of the products that we use in our day to day business. And I would organize this and come back a couple days and be trashed, and then I cleaned up and organized it again, it’d be trashed. And then I talked to somebody else about cleaning up and organizing, they would do it and it’d be trashed. And the moral of the story is this. I was working selfishly for myself, without serving the people around me.

And What I mean by that is this, when I organized the shed, I cleaned it, I made sure to do a great job, everything was placed where it needs to go the shovels where they need to be all the tools accordingly, all those things. But I never once stopped to think about the other people using the shed and how I could help them and serve them by creating a process so that they wouldn’t have to organize the shed again either to eliminate the work to where we would do small things. When we came back in from jobs or small things when we came to put tools away and do different things, small little steps to where the Shed never got trashed again, and I didn’t serve anybody from it. And I’m calling this the shed effect, where you go, it’s like the junk drawer, you clean out the junk drawer. And then you come back and you’re frustrated and pissed because everybody else in the house. They didn’t respect What you worked for. They didn’t respect organization, they didn’t respect the cleanliness. And the reason why is because you cleaned for you. And you didn’t include anybody else. Now you may have wanted other people to keep the junk drawer clean. And I may have wanted other people to keep the shed clean. But the issue with that is I actually didn’t take the steps necessary to fulfill those wants or desires to keep the shed clean, because I left the other people out of the equation.

This happens all the time in our lives. This happens with management. If you’re managing and you constantly find that you’re frustrated with your team for not doing certain things, that is a clear sign that you are not serving your team, you are not enabling your team to succeed. And you’re not creating the things that should be made for your team to be successful. And you’re not delegating the way you should. Any frustration towards Oh, the shed is messy, or the junk drawer is not clean, or this isn’t being done, oh man, you’re not answering the phone right away, it all comes back to your leadership or your teamwork. And it all comes back to you not doing the real work of serving, not answering the phones, you as a leader, your job isn’t just to answer the phone, if you’re in charge of a call center, or if you’re in charge of the front desk, it’s not to do that. It’s to build a environment that has processes that has culture that enables the person or the people that are working for you to succeed to grow and change and then take ownership of whatever that is.

And not just a process, not just a checklist, oh, do this, this and this and this, right? Like going back to the shed if I stopped and I talked to all of my teammates at that time and saying, Hey, guys, if we keep this clean, it will save us closing up at the end of the day. And we all get to go home a whole 30 minutes to an hour faster. And then guess What, we get jobs done quicker. And then our boss yells at us last or whatever I mean, my boss, never yelled at us. I had one of the best bosses in the world at the time. But the point of it is, it ties into something bigger, and then the teamwork is there and see if you’re not going to build for people, you’re not going to have any teamwork for people think about every team sport. Each and every team sport was purposely built to function with team members in it. Not the other way around. It didn’t know we’re just going to play this game and it had nothing to do. It had nothing to do with no team members. It didn’t have anything to do with singularities or individuals. It was purposely intentionally built to have other people join in. And that’s the same thing when you build stuff. Are you going to purposely include people are you going to serve people when you’re doing it or are you just going to do work that is selfish. That is predicated on you looking good because great you organized the shed but it didn’t do anything for anybody else.

So anyways guys, that’s it. The shed effect. I’ll catch you later peace