In Charles Dickens’ classic tale, A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is a prisoner of his own creation. His passion for work and money forge links of despair and doom removing all joy from his life. Where did Scrooge get his work ethic, his avarice and desire for more? Perhaps it was the way Ebenezer was raised as a child and what he came to value as an adult. Ultimately, Ebenezer sees the error of his ways, repents and vows to change his life. The tale closes with Dickens’ hope that all men can change if they see the light, but can we?

Ebenezer explores the past in order to better understand what is happening in his present and to prepare him for the future which he envisions. To change, we must first unlearn the unqualified messages that we heard from people who had good intentions but were not qualified in a specific field of expertise. Remember when you were a kid how you were told that it was crass or inappropriate to talk about money? And who can forget mother’s message about talking to strangers. Well, isn’t our contracting business driven by talking to strangers about how much money they have to accomplish their housing goals?!  

How many messages are rattling around in your brain of which you are unaware? How long have you been carrying them? The reality is that you cannot get rid of these messages because they have been recorded for life. The trick is to keep the good and helpful messages that we received as children from parents and adults and to control the volume on the counter-productive, destructive or unqualified messages. We must learn to live with them because we cannot erase them.

Often, we would like others to change, but why is it we resist change ourselves?  The amount of change we are willing to make will be in direct proportion to the reward we collect.

Office Dirty People
 

Hi, my name is Joe Dellanno this is my job.
 

People are people…boys will be boys and girls are made of sugar and spice and all that’s nice! Many of us start each day in the usual way, get out of bed, take a shower, grab a cup of Joe and head off into the maze of life for another exciting day in the Design/Build industry! We arrive at our place of work and start sniffing out our favorite parking spot hoping that one of our co-workers has not parked their fat SUV in our space! This often can make the day go from good to rotten and it is not even 8:00 am! You begrudgingly park your car in a different parking space and head up to the office with a ‘tude!  

You find your way to your desk only to find several pieces of mail, two memos and a bright pink notice that the office is taking up a collection for world hunger and the owner’s birthday gift! Your stomach turns with aggravation, your blood pressure is rising and it’s not even 8:15 am! The phone rings and that familiar ring tone begins to rattle your brain as if to signal your inner programming to welcome you to another fine day of dealing with people and putting out fires.

The morning continues as it usually does and by the middle of the morning a parade of artificially happy people starts making their rounds like a well staffed psychiatric hospital. After the ninth, “hi, how are doing” conversation your fingers starts to form into a fist! Your voice mail light is blinking, work is piling up and you would like to escape into a Southwest Airlines commercial, “want to get a way?”

Working with people is difficult and if you want to see this story in action pull up a chair, turn on the tube and watch, “The Office” on Thursday nights at 8:30 pm on NBC.  Enabling poor communication, passive-aggressive behavior or accepting excuses causes the work environment to be non-productive, chaotic and wasteful of valuable business time. People are trashy and they will bring their mental head trash to your business and it will show up at a most inconvenient time.

True story
A mid-sized Design/Build Company owner asked me how to stop his lead carpenter from asking questions about how to build the project. I asked a few questions. “Is he competent enough to produce the project, does he speak English, can he add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers, does he have a cell phone, did he accept his position duties and responsibilities at the end of the interviewing process”? To these questions the company owner replied, “yes”. I asked him if I could make a suggestion and the company owner said yes. I asked him to take a piece of paper and write the following in big letters. “If I were not here what would you do?”

I then told him to post it on the outside of his office door. The next day the lead carpenter came into the office like clock work, read the note, turned around and headed back to the job site.

Leadership starts with good leaders who will inspire others to want to produce, be creative and give more than what is expected of them. Poor leaders are consumed by guilt, fear and self doubt which often produces high employee turn over because they have little to no trust in the company and its financial future.

The work place is a dirty people place. My name is Joe Dellanno and this is my job.