A $15 Mistake Worth a Fortune

Photo by A. MacRae

When I was sixteen I learned a vital management lesson.

I was working graveyard shifts at a gas station. Early one night a group of boys bought a couple dollars of merchandise and paid with a twenty dollar bill.

Two minutes later, a paramedic came in to pay for his gas and informed me that the same boys were outside celebrating their good fortune. It seemed that a dumb clerk (me!) had given then change for a $20 when they had only paid with a $5.

I recorded the error and, in the morning when the store manager came in, I reported my mistake. Sure enough, I was missing $15.00. Although this was my largest error, I had been short several times before.

Then my manager did an interesting thing. He took me to his office, had me sit down, and said something I've never forgotten:

"You're a bright kid and I know you can handle what I'm about to tell you...When an employee isn't doing something, there's one of two reasons. It's either will or skill. Either they don't want to do it, or they don't know how." He let that hang in the air a moment, and then asked which I thought applied to my situation.

I was never more than a few pennies off from then on. For me, it wasn't about the skill to make change accurately, but it was a matter of being motivated enough to pay attention to what I was doing.

Effective managers believe in their staff and understand that their team members require both will and skill.

Will is a matter of motivation, environment, and desire. Skill is the practical ability, training, and resources to do something.

However, emerging managers (and many a frustrated veteran) often address the wrong issue when trying to help their employees. Providing training when a person lacks motivation won't help. Creative incentives or consequences when the real problem is a lack of resources or training won't help.

Next time a team member is struggling, take time to analyze the situation. Is it will or is it skill?

If you want to learn more, I encourage you to look at Influencer for a thorough approach to will and skill.

David M. Dye

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David shares twenty years experience teaching, coaching, leading, and managing in youth service, education advocacy, city governance, and faith-based nonprofits. He currently serves as Chief Operating Officer for Colorado UpLift and enjoys helping others discover and realize their own potential.

Book Review: Good to Great

This week's book review is really a two-for-one. Jim Collins' Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't was a follow-up to an earlier work called Built to Last. In part, Good to Great is the focus of this review, but really, of all the books in this series, the most powerful may be Good to Great and the Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great.

Collins wrote the Social Sectors Monograph after many nonprofits asked how he would apply the concepts of Good to Great to Social Sector organizations where shareholder profit is not available as a metric.

His answer to that question is page-for-page one of the most richly packed 35 pages you'll ever read. I recommend the monograph for any manager or leader, whether engaged in nonprofit or for-profit business.

In Good to Great and the Social Sector you will find a distillation of Collins research of thousands of organizations and his team's conclusions about the critical factors that help organizations make the transitions from "good" to enduring quality and impact. 

One of the most critical points Collins makes in this monograph is that a vital key to lasting organizational impact is discipline - and that discipline is not an automatic characteristic of for-profits or nonprofits.

Rather, discipline is a characteristic of great organizations - and is too often lacking from businesses of any stripe.

He goes on to suggest that social sector organizations can assemble a core set of metrics to which they consistently hold themselves accountable. I once heard Collins express the idea like this: You want to assemble a body of evidence such that a jury would have to find you guilty of being effective.

In my opinion, this principle works as well in for-profits as nonprofits. Impact is more than profit.

Good to Great (and the Social Sector) emphasizes a combination of leadership and management principles found in enduringly great organizations. These businesses feature leaders with a "paradoxical combination of humility and professional will". 

The organizations' management is very clear and stays focused on what drives their economic engine - the thing they are able to do better than anyone else in their sphere, yet they change quickly and firmly when innovation is required.

Leaders and managers work together to create a culture of excellence, discipline, results, and impact through a series of small wins which build into momentum with a life of its own.

There is something for nearly every reader in Good to Great and the Social Sector. The section of leadership and results-oriented accountability alone is worth the price of this very small book for any growing leader and manager.

Happy Reading!

If you know someone who would benefit from this post, please retweet, like, +1, or email it on. Thanks!

Subscribe today or join the discussion at: http://davidmdye.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @davidmdye
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmdye

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David shares twenty years experience teaching, coaching, leading, and managing in youth service, education advocacy, city governance, and faith-based nonprofits. He currently serves as Chief Operating Officer for Colorado UpLift and enjoys helping others discover and realize their own potential.