Are You Empowered to Do the Right?Thing?

If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month. ~Theodore Roosevelt

We pass on opportunities to do the right thing. All the time. 

Sure, we give excuses as to why we are not empowered. 

• My boss won’t let me
• I’m not allowed
• It’s too time consuming

And other horse feathers and poppycock. 

Bottom line is — there IS much we CAN do on our own. We just don’t do it. 

Brief story coming up…

It had been a long day. Some time around seven’ish, I headed over to Kroger Supermarket after work. I had been thinking about having some of their prepared salads for dinner. Take the food back to the hotel, kick back, enjoy, relax. 

As I walked up to the Deli, I saw one customer being served by one Deli staff member. No other staff. No other customers waiting. 

Great! I thought to myself. And there they were! The salads I’d been thinking about, laid out in front of my eyes in the refrigerated case. In all their delicious splendor. I started to salivate. 

• Curried Chick Peas and Couscous 
• Cranberry Delight
• Italian Pasta Salad
• Tabouli

You get the picture?

The Deli worker finished up with the previous customer and asked if she could help me. Her name tag said Rebecca. I like to use people’s names whenever possible, so I said, “Yes Rebecca, I would love some of that Curried Chick Pea and Couscous salad. And perhaps a few others as well.”

She politely said, “well, I’m sorry but we stop selling salads at 7 pm.” My jaw dropped. What????

That’s when I noticed 2 things:

• It was 7:20 PM
• None of the food containers in the case had those large serving spoons in them 

I hadn’t realized either of these before. 

Rebecca said, “we’ve already washed the spoons and put them away.”

Aye yay yay, I thought to myself. 

She must have seen the look of disappointment on my face. I’m a terrible poker player. 

“How many spoons am I going to need?” asked Rebecca. 

Huh? I was confused. I told her I didn’t understand. 

She explained that she was going to go in the back and get spoons for each item I wanted, so she needed to know how many to get. Relief now painted all over my face, I told her 3 and off she went to get them. 

We then spent the next few minutes chatting while she served my items. Turns out she had lived in Texas for several years, as had I and we traded Texas stories. It was a nice conversation at the end of my long day. 

Here’s the point of the story:

Rebecca broke a Kroger rule and then empowered herself to make a customer happy

There was no supervisor around to ask for permission. 

No manager she paged to come to the Deli to give her a green light. 

No manual or rule book she pulled out to look up what to do. 

She knew exactly what to to do and just did it

Do you know exactly what to do? And do you just do it?

If you work for a place that doesn’t “empower” you, are you doing something to change that?

And if the place you work at won’t let you make the decision to do the right thing on your own, are you working on an exit to a place that will embrace and empower you?

Empower yourself. Take the power…

This is a Simple Leadership Lesson. Visit my publication Simple and Practical Leadership and follow me for more short, useful, and practical Leadership Wisdom.

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