It’s Always Your Job
One of the coolest eras of my life was when I worked for the Boy Scouts. I took 6-8 weeks every summer and lived out of a tent in the middle of nowhere. No electricity. No Internet. No cell phones. No television.
It was heavenly.
Working for the Scouts also taught me some great work ethics. The first rule has defined my attitude towards work ever since:
Work until you think you can’t. Then keep working until someone tells you to stop.
Having that voice in my head helps me work all night to close out client projects, fight to finish difficult – sometimes messy – cleanup jobs, and run long distances despite being tired. It’s a rare sentiment among many people in my age group, and rarer still among those in my industry.
The second rule we learned was that everything is your job. At camp, we used outhouses. They’d frequently run out of supplies or get … um … messy and a Scout or Scouter would come and ask for help from the staff. The one thing you were never to say is “it’s not my job.”
Everyone, from the trainees to the area directors to the business manager to the camp cook was expected to immediately stop whatever they were doing and help whenever a Scout asked a question. If you were on your way to take a break, you’d detour to stock the TP or hose out a mess. It didn’t matter who you were, what your jot title was, or how much you were paid. It was never not your job.
As a result, we built an incredibly coherent unit. I’m still close friends with many of the staff, and we’ll be trekking back up to camp in two weeks to labor away in the mud and rain (that’s what we do for fun, after all). We haven’t worked together as a camp staff in over 6 years, but there’s still a deep meaning to what it means to be a “Cooper Staffer.”
Every organization has a brand, and it is the responsibility of each and every person in that company to live up to the brand. The intern should be encouraged to learn the jobs of the people above him. The CEO should be willing to offer her time to customer support when call loads are high. Every member of the brand has a hand in shaping it – no matter what their job title might be.
WPMU.org … A Great Bad Example
Yesterday, I was alerted to a blog post on WPMU.org about plugin localization. I don’t normally read that site, but figured it was worth a look based on who’d sent out the link via Twitter. Frankly, I wasn’t happy. [Read more...]
. I’ve actually been waiting for this book for a while now, so I put down my Tom Clancy novel and immediately dug in. For a business book, it was amazingly easy to read, and I was proud to finish it in just 3 days despite a heavy work schedule.
