How to improve the areas that are unknowingly hurting our careers.
“Remember that pickup truck we used to have?” While still decades away, my goal for retirement is spending relaxing mornings with a really nice cup of coffee, reading a fresh newspaper, and reminiscing with my wife about the good ole’ days.
One of those future memories will involve my lifelong desire to own a full-size pickup truck. Unfortunately, I had never been able to justify purchasing one, with their horrific gas mileage. Then technology caught up with my desires, and the next thing I knew, I was the proud owner of a new truck.
Jeffrey Kreafle is the General Manager/COO of Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis, Mo. Founded in 1897, Bellerive Country Club is only the third golf course to host all of the men’s rotating majors. Bellerive is also the future host of the 100th PGA Championship in 2018. Questions and suggested |
Even though my truck gets great mileage for something that can haul everything and anything in town, it is still incredibly modest by most vehicles’ standards. After only a week of ownership, and in a diabolical twist of fate, I realized the truck had an instant miles-per-gallon screen. American-made horrors!!!
For months, this simple calculation haunted me. I couldn’t get the numbers out of my head. I tried looking at the other dials, but I kept coming back to this screen like a bug to a bright light. And to make matters worse, my real-life driving performance was tracking far below the vehicle’s EPA-suggested mileage standards.
While it took quite a bit of time, and some deep soul-searching, I have come to love this feature because I realize it is analogous to life and our jobs. Our performance is constantly being evaluated; unfortunately, we don’t have a meter that tells us when we are not performing optimally.
Here are some simple life lessons we can all learn from similar dials on our own “vehicles”:
- Don’t overestimate your abilities, or underestimate your weaknesses. Pride, self-justification, blind spots, closed-loop judgment, or cognitive dissonance affect us daily—without our knowledge. As Carl Jung used to say, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” We are all subject to these factors, and until you identify them within yourself, they will direct your future without your knowledge.There are many great personality tests (most are now online and affordable) that can help you tremendously in this area. At Bellerive, my staff and I did this exercise together as a team, and it was illuminating to see how accurate the assessments were for each of us.
- Anything you measure improves. In his book, “What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School,” the late Mark McCormick, founder of IMG, wrote about how he would measure different items in different months. Whenever he audited phone bills, there was a great reduction in long-distance calls. Whenever he measured overtime, there was a great reduction in labor. His audits were so forensic in nature that it had the added benefit of making everyone believe that every detail was being watched just as closely. By having my instant miles per gallon posted constantly, my driving efficiency improved greatly, and immediately.
- Life-cycles make a difference. Trucks and automobiles perform better after being broken in. My average miles per gallon in the first 10,000 miles of owning my truck was significantly below my average for the next 10,000. This is also true with our jobs. It takes months—and in many cases years—to really understand the culture of our facilities. Once we have a better grasp of these unique histories and traditions, we are more efficient with our decision-making. While you should be careful about making sweeping changes too early, you must also remember we are not paid to make the inevitable happen.
- Create benchmarks. Until I knew how my developed driving habits translated into average MPG, I didn’t have a reference point for improvement. Many of us use the operating statement in our facilities as our only performance tool. While that is a good indicator of financial health, it doesn’t complete the picture of organizational health. As James Baldwin said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” If you have an issue plaguing your workplace with morale or turnover, figure out a way to develop benchmarks, and then work tirelessly to improve against that standard.
- We don’t always perform at our highest level, and outside influences affect our performance. As soon as winter hit, my average MPG dropped significantly. At first I couldn’t understand why, because I had not altered my driving habits. Then I realized that in Missouri, they go to a winter blend of gas. This gas is cheaper and not as pure, so I was getting better MPG in the summer than in the winter.
For those who are in seasonal facilities, it is easy to see your performance drop during the offseason. We now cherish and make full use of this time at Bellerive, because it allows us to get significant planning done for the entire upcoming season. This would be an impossible task if you still had the high volume of operational activity you have in-season.
We all have a drive to succeed. By borrowing some simple principles from our auto industry, we can all cross the finish line much quicker and much happier.
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