To end my holidays and to start the week, my wife (any excuse will do for her) wanted Hot Wings from her favorite place in the city. So she rang and ordered while I drove to pick them up. But when I got there and asked for them under my wife's name, the woman behind the counter said there was no such order. I repeated the name and was met with,
"Are you sure this is the right place?"
Yes, I am certain, but I will call her to check.
"Call her?!?"
Yes. My wife.
"So you aren't here to pick up for a delivery??"
No.
"Oh, then we do have a ready order under that name."
Not every foreigner delivers food.
This isn't the first time this has happened at takeaway places, but considering that they did in fact have an order by that name, wouldn't some kind of bell have gone off?
"Normally pickups are for SERVICE deliveries"
The restaurant was closed. There were ONLY pickups. So, ALL orders were pickups.
It was funny to see how uncomfortable she got, but as someone who has worked in these kinds of places and have put my foot in my mouth on numerous occasions where someone didn't see the funny side, I kind of felt for her too. Kinda.
I do think about these things sometimes in regard to my daughter though, who while brunette, is pale-skinned with bright blue eyes and is unlikely to ever be mistaken for anything other than a "local" - so to speak. She is likely to hear all kinds of conversations throughout her lifetime and I suspect, not all are going to be savory in respect to those who might look different than herself. While the world has changed a lot in the last 50 years or so, some things will likely never change and for a long time to come, the variations in these arbitrary human features are going to create conflicts.
I know that for me here, a lot of people make an incorrect assumption that I don't have an education and then, when they realize I went to university, they find a way to discount it somehow. I don't mind this, as one of the biggest wastes of time, were the years I spent at uni. Useless. Well, in terms of what I learned and how it was applicable to anything practical in the world. Practicality doesn't seem to matter though for many people, nor does logic.
It was my first day "in the new job" today and I sat in on the first session (There is a two-month-long series of topics I will deliver) that I will likely start my own in March. It is an onboarding and enablement position, meaning that these people are new to the company and I am helping them get up to speed with internal processes, but they are not newbies (most of them) themselves, they are well-seasoned and experienced professionals who were hired because they are already good at what they do. However, because of the variation in background, they are going to have to align their processes (to some degree) with the company practices. This doesn't always go smoothly in the beginning, until they start to get the ROI on the changed behavior and realize that they are better off for it.
The idea isn't to cookie cutter their high-end skills, it is to align their base processes to give all their "flair" more impact and enable the project team to do their job as effectively as possible to reduce Time to Value (TTV). This is a labor intensive industry, is filled with knowledge experts and requires a diverse range of human involvement in order to go from 0 to complete. And, because it runs on a SaaS model, the sale itself is only the first milestone, ongoing customer engagement and retention is required in order to provide adequate return and the first "profits" are realized far after the project team have finished.
Lone-wolfing will be met with far poorer results than internal collaboration, but what I have liked so far, is that for the most part, people are open and willing to help each other out. I think that one of the reasons for this is that there is more personal value in working together than competing and, there is more professional opportunity in it too. In some companies, the "best in job" gets the promotion, but at this company, that is cross-referenced to what other kinds of value the person brings to the job. As a result, the internal competition is relatively low and the social atmosphere quite high. People can be open because they don't have to be wary of getting a knife in their back.
This is why "corporate culture" is so important, because just like having a reference group, when we are surrounded by people who bring out our best through their support and behavior, we are also more likely to support and behave in ways that enable others too. It is a growth mindset, where there is still plenty of room for individuality and variation, because it is that value of variance that is encouraged and rewarded. It allows people to shine in the areas that they choose, in ways that they choose and gives them a higher return for doing so.
Of course there are still various policies and the like that come with the territory of corporate life, but considering, there is a very flat hierarchy and a relatively decentralized decision-making environment, but it is still tied to a corporate framework and managed through the company-wide tools, which narrows the variation and directs focus.
One of the interesting things I have found in my three years there is, people are often supported to leave the company. They have a pretty good hiring process and don't want to lose their best, but because of the field, many will naturally look for new challenges and adventure. Due to the structure of the product, a lot of these "leavers" have not made it very far, with many moving in to head up partner organizations, start their own feature-based development companies that support the core, or become consultants that are hired back as external resources. This means that they can keep adding value, whilst getting value too - but of course, this kind of activity isn't ideal for everyone. Or, it isn't suitable for everyone at the moment.
The valuable experience of a professional doesn't come from a book, it comes from practical life interactions and development and it is the richness of this profile that is highly sort after. Where a person is not only able to do the job well, but be the kind of collaborative support that enables others to do their job a little better too. When this is happening across many points continuously, the compounding effects on results are quite extraordinary. A little more goes a very long way, when everyone is value adding and, if they are recognized and rewarded for this, they are incentivized to keep adding.
But, once we close ourselves off to possibility and start working on assumption, rather than transparency of information and discussion, we start to lose the compounding effects of collaboration, because we weaken the relationships, degrading them down to assumed function, rather than actual ability. It is costly, because not only does the one who gets reduced lose opportunity, everyone else that could benefit from the compounding of skill variation loses opportunity too.
A long time ago, two colleagues I worked with in a terrible software localization testing company, were struggling to make ends meet, but were happy they were no longer driving a garbage truck. They were both very highly educated and spoken multiple languages - but for several years just couldn't land anything where their skills were utilized, let alone appreciated. They both ended up at Rovio in the early days and went on to help them develop Angry Birds. In a slightly different outcome, they might have been delivering Hot Wings.
Most of our outcomes aren't down to what we do, but instead, what is outside of our control and we have no effect on whatsoever. But, it is natural to judge people on the information we have available and assume we are right, even though we often have no feedback on just how wrong our evaluations may have been and, no way to follow up to be corrected.
The more we surround ourselves with homogeneity, the less likely we are to discover what values we are missing, and benefit from all the compounding affects. People don't like random, they want certainty, familiarity, their expectations and assumptions met and as such, many will miss benefiting, because they surround themselves with what they know, not with from which they could learn something.
The Hot Wings were good.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]