Author: leadership dots by dr. beth triplett

I am fascinated by the Uline catalog – a monstrous collection of items that businesses need to function: carpet mats, cardboard boxes, shrink wrap, strapping kits, pallet racks, stair treads, labels, rolling ladders, utility jugs, safety goggles and no parking signs – just to name a few. Not only do they carry thousands of items, but they also have seemingly infinite variations on the items they do carry. (For example, they stock over 220 sizes of gusseted poly bags!) In short, Uline carries all the non-sexy but essential items for shipping, packaging and industrial use – things that are taken for granted when they are in stock but cause operations to cease when inventory has run out.

Sometimes I think that the backroom employees are the Uline of personnel staffing. Operational staff often accomplish their work in anonymity and few understand their role. They deal with a level of complexity that outsiders don’t (and don’t need to) understand but it would baffle others that so many nuances even exist.

So often the focus is on those who deal directly with the customers, but without the work of those in support functions, service would be detrimentally impacted and it couldn’t be business as usual. We may not see those who pay the bills, ensure that taxes are submitted, change the air filters or buy the printer paper, but if they failed to do their job it would cause a commotion for everyone else.

Uline has found a niche by being in the business of helping businesses be able to run their business. Your backroom staff is doing the same for you. You may have no desire to understand their work but acknowledge that it is critical in order for you to do yours.

I spent some time this weekend reading one of Sandra Brown’s suspense novels that involved a scene where an airplane pilot is describing the near-miss he had earlier in his career. He termed it “The Swiss Cheese Model.”

“In order for a catastrophic event, such as a plane crash, to occur, a sequence of events precedes it, Think of these separate factors as slices of Swiss cheese lined up one behind the other. If any one of the holes in them doesn’t align with the others, the series of events is changed or curtailed, and a catastrophe is prevented. But if all the holes line up –”

 The character went on to describe the scenario from his past: the first officer spilling his coffee, the mechanic who failed to notice the coffee had shorted out a wire, the false alarm the short triggered, the pilot being short on sleep, the lightning storm, etc. It was not one factor that nearly caused a crash, rather the (mis)alignment of many events in a row.

Think of how you can install warning signals in your organization that could alert you when a few pieces of “cheese” are beginning to assemble. Are there trigger events that should signal a management review or certain actions that should require more than one person to be involved in the decision making? Many organizations monitor key performance indicators, but do you pay attention to sequencing, not just the data itself? And when something does go wrong, do you review the “pieces of cheese” that led up to the problem rather than just examining the ultimate outcome?

Every strategy has holes in it. Your job as a leader is to ensure that the holes don’t line up in a way to create a disaster.

Source: Low Pressure by Sandra Brown, 2012, pp. 269-270.