Your Role As A Follower

Your role is to make your bosses life easier and you do that by understanding their pressures and relieving them without prompt

All business begins the same way, someone has an idea to provide something and they set about this path. At some point the amount of work becomes too much and/or the realization that they cannot scale their business without help occurs. At this point, they look for someone to assist in their business. This purpose of this assistance is in theory very simple. I need to hire someone to offload some tasks so that I can free myself up to work on the business versus continually working in the business. You can only do both for so long before you lose the ability to serve your clients and continue developing. It is important to note that this applies in all contexts. Public sector, private sector, sports teams, everywhere you find a person who is in charge or leading a group of people. The singular point of responsibility is trying to figure out ways to serve the clients while continuing to grow the quality of service, amount of reach of the business, profit, efficiency or what have you. So how does this apply to you? You need to recognize that you’re part of a greater system and your job is to make life easier for the person you are responsible to. If that’s a coach of a team, how can you best execute the plays that are being given to you? Ask yourself, what is the organization, coach, boss trying to achieve? Often the lead will have a desired outcome but will not yet have had the time to flush out the “how are we going to achieve it?” You exist to do the tasks but ultimately your perceived value shoots up when you contribute to the “how” and design the tasks needed to achieve that. Design the path to your supervisor’s intended destination. Contribute checklists, procedures, solicit support of other staff, look for ways to more efficiently achieve the end result and bring forward solidly thought out plans. However, recognize that you may not be privy to all information that your boss/supervisor has and therefore be prepared to modify your plan or suggestion accordingly. Often the supervisor will have provided very basic tasks because of the limited time they had available to design a solution. Consequently, they may only have shared the bare minimum of information with you so as to initiate the solution right away with full intentions of circling around eventually to make the process fuller or more efficient. When you look at the basic information provided, and identify more complete information/procedures to the manager, you show that you’re an active participant in the process and interested in contributing to solutions. At this point, a good manager will recognize this and fil you in on more of the challenges and surrounding information so that you can more accurately direct your efforts. Rarely have I ever seen a manager discard the contributions of an employee who shows high motivation and well thought out plans based on the information they had available to them. Now, this is to be balanced against what I call the “Clever idea grenade group”. All too often an employee who has only ever been a task oriented person comes forward with a “Clever idea grenade”. These are employee/staff ideas which are either way too late to the path that we’re on, or simply a clever idea without any thought to how it will be executed and what the impact to the organization will be. For example, employees have come to me on separate occasions in separate organizations with the “Clever idea grenade” of “I was thinking that it would be great for us to hire students”. In fact, on one occasion, the employee not only said that but presented it as “I had a great idea that we should hire a student and I’ve talked to the team and they all agree it would be great to hire a student for maybe 4 months”. Is there anything wrong with this idea? No, but it’s a clever idea grenade. Why? Because as a supervisor /manager I am already full up on ideas and busy plotting the current operations, future operations, responding to senior management, handling labor issues for staff, worrying about delivering service to our clients etc….So how do you as an employee feel about what I just said? If you react to me saying that with disappointment in that I have not recognized your idea as being great, then you are an average employee who can easily be replaced. Valued yes, but not unique nor exceptional. The manner in which you have just presented your “great idea” is received by me as: “I just had a thought which I did not flush out at all on how to execute but presented to all the other employees who also agreed it would be a great idea. I did not think about the ability to implement the idea nor did I look at any of the costs. I also did not consider whether or not there were specific tasks that a student would be capable of doing in a 4 month period which would add value to the company or make life easier for you as management. I would like credit for this brilliant idea but want to hand over the work described above to you to execute. In fact, if you choose not to take on this work, I have protected my own ego but spreading around the office that I was going to push this idea up to management and if they do not do anything with it, that’s not my fault”

I would assume after reading the above interpretation that you may be a little horrified. What you’re feeling now is your own ego fighting to make you feel better about your own actions in the past as you begin to recognize whether or not you have actually been making your supervisor’s life easier or not. I would suspect you’re quickly seeing that what you’ve been doing is walking around throwing grenades which then fuel your dissatisfaction and disappointment in management that they have not picked up the grenade and made YOUR life easier. That is not why you get paid.

How do you change a “Clever idea grenade” into a valued contribution? Think.

It’s that simple, think these ideas through before you present them. How far you go on the thought process will vary supervisor to supervisor and it’s your job to figure that out but let’s take the example above and change the way it’s presented.

“I had an idea about possibly hiring a student for a 4 month period if you can confirm the salary may be available. I figure it will cost about $16, 000 to bring them on staff for that period but I have the following projects to suggest that they work on. These projects would make our work environment more efficient and I think may even speed up production such that we put out an additional 4 units per week. This would translate to additional revenue of $30K per month. I would be more than happy to work with them throughout the period and serve as their mentor to ensure they progress the projects. Looking long term, if we can hire the same student back next summer, when they graduate, I think we would have a great employee that we’ve trained. Additionally, they may serve as a great recruiting tool to find more of their classmates.”

Do you see the difference? The employee in the above case has introduced an idea which does not increase the manager’s workload, potentially can increase the revenue of the company and may aid in recruitment of not only 1 new employee but potentially others. This is awesome. How many employees like the one above would you like to have working for you? I’d take as many as I could get. Yes, with that sort of attitude and approach, this employee is destined to advance their career quickly but what a great value add to a company. Be that person in all areas of your life, seek to make life for the next level easier and you’ll be fulfilled and likely advanced to more and more rewarding positions.

I once observed the president of the company go into our staff canteen. In this canteen there was a junior employee scheduled every day to handle the canteen sell items and collect the cash. This day, I happened to be in the hallway when the president of the company went into the canteen, opened the fridge and saw that there was dried soda on the bottom. He walked passed the employee, grabbed some paper towel, wet it, walked back to the fridge, got down on his hands and knees and scrubbed the fridge clean. The employee said, Sir, you don’t need to do that, I would have cleaned it. He responded saying “No need to trouble yourself now, if you had wanted to take care of it, you’d have done it already. No need to get up now because I am here.”

What a powerful message. This example speaks to pride in your environment, integrity, work ethic, attention to detail, respect and leadership all in one. Don’t be the person who waits for someone else to point out areas for improvement that are well within your ability. So what if it’s not your job to clean, so what if it’s not your job to replace a broken something in the work environment? We all work in the space together, take action, and make things better. Make life easier for the people you work for and ultimately contribute positively to your own work environment.