“Wash your own coffee mugs”

“And someone else’s, too”.

I borrowed this quote from my absolutely favourite author and creator Seth Godin, to explore it through slightly different lenses.

It starts and ends with the coffee mugs. Replace coffee mugs with slides, tickets, tasks, and you’ll get an answer to why many of the deadlines are missed, the end result is lower than expected, why you need quality control, and why employees think the pay is unfair.

One dirty coffee mug put in an unassigned place in a shared kitchen automatically attracts the rest of the mugs, and by the end of the day you run out of clean ones, and the entire place is a total mess.

Many of us spent at least some time at student dorms, and we all know there are ways to deal with such problems.

But where did all those people go to when they entered the corporate world? Right. Washing coffee mugs is someone else’s job. And it is someone else’s job to close that ticket, to make client happy, and to arrive on time. A blame game has no point, and it’s not my point either to show you that one dirty mug lowers the standard for the whole product and your brand. My point is to claim that the opposite is good.

Because it produces a surplus.

?

#careercoaching #fridaythoughts