Sacrifice

Your team knows you care about them by your level of willingness to sacrifice and serve them.

The year must have been around 1980. There had been an unexpected significant increase in the volume of our business, and it hit us in the heart of the summer vacation season. And it was HOT inside that plant—90 degrees outside and those presses generated plenty of their own heat! The several hundred thousand feet of production space lacked air-conditioning. Our production team simply lacked the capacity to absorb the deadlines for the orders that came pouring in. Key operators were on vacation, and it was all hands on deck. And I mean ALL HANDS.

At that time my dad was serving as president of the company. The entire management team, including himself, came out on the floor and sweat it out with our team in our non-air-conditioned plant. The simplest machine to operate was the taper. The operator of this machine would take the loads of flat corrugated stock, load them into the front of the machine, and the take the two ends in order to fold them together and start them through the machine that would tape it together. That week the president was the operator of the taper. The impact of seeing him sacrificing for the team in this way developed a respect and loyalty that never would have been there without it. Trust me, as the president of the company he had plenty to do back in his air-conditioned office on that hot July day, but he was out there with everyone else.

Your team knows you care about them by your level of willingness to sacrifice and serve them.

Fast forward to four years ago. We’d had a wetter than normal spring and it took its toll on the aging roof of our building. Without warning, one day parts of the roof began to collapse and fall down on the equipment and team members in the plant. Fortunately no one was hurt, but production shut down on Friday, and an emergency crew from a roofing company came in to begin the six-figure repair work early Saturday morning. That meant that a crew of production and maintenance team members would be coming in on that Saturday, too (their day off). 

I have almost no skills in the area of safety netting, roof repair, and equipment protection, but knowing that team members were coming in on their day off to deal with this emergency in order to get production up and running led me to drive in that morning simply to be with them. Choosing to sacrifice my day off to actively support them, to thank them in person and in real time for what they were doing, made a huge difference.

Your team knows you care about them by your level of willingness to sacrifice and serve them.

The story is told of Modupe, who was a farmer in West Africa. He lived near the top of a mountain while his fellow villagers lived down in the valley. During one rainy season on the River Baba, he saw that the dam was about to burst. He knew he did not have enough time to run down to the valley to warn the other villagers—by the time he could arrive, they would be swept away by the rush of waters. And so Modupe did the only thing he could do: He set his house on fire. When the villagers saw the smoke and flames, they ran up the mountain to help him. As they arrived, the raging waters tore through their village below, destroying their homes and crops.

At the end, he said “Don’t worry, my crops are still here. We can share them while we build a new village.”  Then all the people began to sing and give thanks. (The story of Modupe is taken from Ujima, a production of Nguzo Saba Films, produced by Carol Munday Lawrence.)

Certainly we can go too far in sacrificing for our team where we ourselves become out of balance and lose our credibility and impact. However, great team leaders know that it is in times of crisis that making sacrifices for the sake of their team communicates care in a unique way that can’t be communicated under any other circumstances.

Even if the sacrifices are not noticed, thank you for the ways you demonstrate care for your team through the large and small sacrifices you make for them.

Lead on!
Jeff

Image by KB Digital PVD. Used under CC-BY-ND 2.0 license.