One of my favorite books is Good to Great by Jim Collins.

He has a quote that I use all of the time. “Are you on the right seat of the bus?”

I have been thinking about that statement quite a bit lately. What if
you were hired and you were on the right seat of the bus and all of a
sudden the bus driver changed?

The new bus driver may take a different route. The bus driver may not drive as fast or may drive too fast. The bus driver may fall asleep. So you decide you want off the bus because you don’t want to change bus drivers.

Now, I’m wondering if it is about the right seat on the bus or about the
bus driver.

What happens when the bus driver changes?

In 1994, I was an Assistant Manager for Wal-Mart in Fairfax, Virginia. It was a stressful time of year for us.  We had just finished having a visit from Discount Store News (that is a big time magazine for retailers). All of the executives from Target, Kmart were there touring our store. We had a great visit.  Just when we were getting back into our normal routine we received a call from a Sr. Executive at Wal-Mart. We were going to get a visit from Wall Street. Sam Walton had died a few years earlier and they wanted to know why our stock was going down and if we could survive without Mr. Sam.
 
Luckily, we had a month to prepare for our next visit.  The pep talk to our management team from our District Manager, “Well we have to have a good visit because there are so hundreds of thousands of employees that are counting on you, our company is relying on you and our stock holders need you to help the stock prices go back up. Oh, and if we get a bad visit, you are all fired.” He didn’t even laugh when he said it. 
 
We worked our tails off and the store looked great. The Wall Street team came and toured around the location with us. They asked question after question. We had answers.
 
Here is what blew me away.  When we were touring the store, they asked us about the basics. Merchandise being instock, pricing, and checking people out. We had gone over the top with decorating the store, cleaning the store, balloons, streamers, etc.  Yet, they loved the basics, not the fluff. This is where one of my favorite sayings came from. “You have to bake the cake before you put the frosting on.”
 
What area of your life, job, relationship with your spouse, etc. do you need to focus on the basics instead of all the fluff?
 
BTW, the tour went great, we didn’t get fired and our stock price went up.

I just finished reading a book called the No Complaining Rule by Jon Gordon. It really made me think of how easy it is to complain when things don’t go the way we planned.  Some of the things that can frustrate me and then I may complain about it:

• Traffic or people not driving the way I think they should
• Standing in line at the store and they don’t open additional registers, especially since they have 30 but only 3 are open
• When work doesn’t go the way I planned
• OU football team loses
• My wife makes dinner and I have to wait an extra 10 minutes for it to cook
• Gaining weight even though I don’t exercise or eat right.  

I am sure I could add other things to this list.  I do have a choice though.  As the book states, I can jump on the positive road or the negative road.  MY CHOICE!   

So why is it so easy to jump on the negative road?  

I want to share a couple of things from the book that stand out to me:

• One negative person can create a miserable office environment for everyone else.
• Mindless complaining cultivates negativity- this sabotages morale and performance.
• If you have a complaint, take it only to someone who is in a position to address the complaint. Also share one or two possible solutions to your complaint.

What am I going to do about complaining? Well, I decided to do a no complaining FAST, taking it one day at a time. I also have asked for someone’s help in holding me accountable.  My desire is for my co-workers, family and friends to notice the change in my behavior. 

What makes you complain and what can you do to change your behavior?

Bill Parcells is/was a great coach. I do know he has made mistakes in his career and the last mistake is the one that  is freshest on my mind. He picked a super star to be on his team,  but the super star wasn’t a team player. This guy had an attitude that “the world revolved around him”. Bill Parcells thought he could change him. Well he couldn’t and it eventually cost him his job. 

Bill Parcells is famous and I am not. Okay I said it. 

I do wonder if I have similarities with him. I love to take on a challenge and I even have the attitude that “oh, I could help him”.  Actually, I am saying I can fix him. Where I work we have this test called CDAT (can do anything). I scored very high on it. Sometimes a high score on this test can also be a fault. Heck my one of my favorite quotes is: “if we can put a man on the moon we can figure this out”. I am not cocky, I just really believe together we can find a way to get the mission accomplished.  

The Bill Parcells scenario makes me think, do I sometimes get in the way of the team by thinking I can fix this person? I know I can change them. Do I mess with the team chemistry because it is about me? Does anyone else hang on to a person to long even though it affects the team? What about you? Have you kept someone on your team that you should have cut ties with?

A few years ago I was very confused on why someone doesn’t call if they can’t make it to volunteer or to go on a mission. I didn’t understand it, I thought everyone called or emailed when they couldn’t make an appointment.   The questions ran through my head – why don’t they come to meetings, why do they leave early, why won’t they do this and why won’t they do that?  Why do some greeters not say hello and smile? Why do the small groups not last?  It made me think that people just aren’t very committed.

Then I was watching Andy Stanley at a Catalyst conference and what he said changed my thinking.  He said maybe the system is broken.  As I listened to his message, I finally realized I was blaming everyone else when all I had to do was look in the mirror.  The things I was questioning were important, but my systems were broken, I was the problem.  It was time for me to re-evaluate my systems. I had to take a hard look at what was broken and fix it. I wish I could say it was easy and painless, but I would be lying. I slowly started making baby steps to correct my issues or should I say systems on my team. Eventually it started to work.

So as I leave you today I would like for you to think about something that isn’t working, ie  “My employees, kids, students will not _________! ”

Maybe it isn’t them, it could be your system is broken.