Landlubbers and the Smell of Land

If you’ve ever lived in or near, or spent time in a coastal community, you know the odors that emanate from the estuaries and tidal marshes, especially at low tide. Familiar though not altogether pleasant, the distinctive odors are emitted by the various creatures and microscopic life forms that inhabit such places through their life stages – living, dying, dead and decaying.

We typically associate that agglomeration of odors with all things related to being at the seaside. We think of it as “the smell of the sea.” But that’s just because of our point of view.

To a sea-going fisherman or sailor, someone who spends most of his days on the ocean, that same odor is “the smell of land.” As he sets sail and heads out to sea that odor fades away and the predominant sense is the clean salt air. In the same way, as we head inland away from the seashore, the aroma dies away and the smells of plants, flowers and life on land predominate.

At the point where the seaside aromas prevail, landlubbers and men of the sea share a common sensual experience. It’s the same odors, smelling the same to both, yet perceived and interpreted in opposite terms.

It’s all a matter of perspective and what one is most familiar with.

The same is true with life, including life within a business organization. People come to various challenges and opportunities with a set of biases that spring quite naturally from the environment in which they operate every day and the experiences they have there.

A typical company’s various functions present a case in point. Gather managers from different operations in a room to deal with a particular challenge and you’re likely to get perceptions that reflect their areas of expertise and focus.

The finance guy sees the challenge through a fiscal lens. The sales manager comes at it with the bias of the customer. The human resources manager sees the internal people implications. The supply chain manager infers the impact on parts inventory and pricing. And so on.

In the same way, people at different levels of the organization or geographic locations have similarly divergent perceptions of challenges and opportunities. It’s not at all unusual for headquarters-based people to see things considerably different from people in the field, at remote locations, facilities or factories.

Being on the ground dealing directly with customers is an entirely different experience than inhabiting the upper floors of the company’s head office. On the one hand, the person is confronting the real world impact of the company’s products and policies, while the other is operating largely within a theoretical construct. At the same time, however, the person at the headquarters office may see the nuances of challenges and opportunities that the front line guy misses because he’s too close to it.

Both smell the same odors, yet it’s land to one and sea to the other.

Both perceptions are right and both imply realities and insights that, together, add value to the corporation’s pursuit of its mission. Problems arise when that distinction is not understood by one another, not taken into account and not fully appreciated.

Breaking down the walls of perception to see through another’s eyes is key to the organization’s ability to fulfill its mission, to achieve collective superiority, as it should.

Instead of a pointless argument over what amounts to a semantic difference, it’s better to know and appreciate that your landlubber friend smells the same thing as you, even though he expresses it differently. It’s the first step in the process toward achieving collective excellence.

Lessons from Summers Long Ago

Lessons that are meaningful and useful in our work can come from anywhere, sometimes even our own youth. I learned an important one about the value of a strong work ethic during my college years.

My summers at that time were filled with labor-intensive jobs. Often, it entailed working alongside other young men that, without the opportunity of college, would likely do pretty much the same kind of work for the rest of their lives.

Two summers, I worked for the California Division of Forestry (CDF), fighting fires in the Sierra foothills of Calaveras County. Among the local men, there was an initial arms’ length attitude towards me and two other coworkers who, come Labor Day, would leave for college, a world they knew nothing of.

Sometimes, they didn’t use our names, addressing us as: “College Boy.” It was not a term of endearment. Nevertheless, we came to respect one another over time through our shared experience of fighting wild fires.

In many ways, those hard-working fellows were way ahead of us. Coming from local blue collar families, they understood from an early age the importance of hard work and the central role it played in one’s life, helping assure independence and the ability to support a family. I was just a self-involved College Boy, with no real responsibilities.

Ken McCrank was typical. Married and already a father, Ken was just a couple years older than I. He had previously worked at the only major employer in the area, a cement factory. Ken was relieved to put that dreadfully dirty and hazardous job behind him, happy to call himself a State of California employee with all its job security and benefits.

I came to respect him for his solid work ethic and, in hindsight, for the life lesson his attitude gave me.

At the CDF, when not fighting fires – which could be dirty, exhausting, very hot, and sometimes-dangerous work – we were nevertheless working hard. We did what the captain told us to do: paint buildings, wash and wax fire trucks, or cut firebreaks in anticipation of wild fires.

On one 100-degree day, Ken and I were assigned to dig a ditch. Not eager to labor in the hot sun, I set about scheming to get out of the task. Ken laughed at me. “If you’d spend as much time working as you do trying to figure out how not to work, you’d get a lot more done and be finished a lot sooner,” he said, as he grabbed the shovel to start the ditch.

There was no arguing his point. I deserved the good-natured ribbing.

Ken and others like him with whom I worked those many summers ago gave me a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the work ethic that they brought to the job.

In my work today, helping companies communicate effectively with their employees – including hourly workers who are often a lot like Ken – memories of those college summers sometimes come back to me. Ken’s sweaty, grinning face is etched in my memory as I consider how best to engage the front line workers in the company’s larger mission.

Too often, managers view their workers in the abstract and not as fellow human beings also striving to contribute value to a cause larger than their own. I’ve seen situations where such employees sense managers’ aloofness and respond appropriately by disconnecting. The job becomes just a paycheck. There is no emotional connection and no investment on their part.

That’s a lost opportunity for the company. When people are proud of their work and their employer, engaged in the business, and desiring a mutual commitment from their managers, the value is beyond measure.

It pained me when I once heard a paper mill worker say, “I check my brain at the door” because no one cared what he thought, what he had learned on the job, or how he might contribute to improving the operation. What he was really saying was that he was not committed to the organization because the message he got from his company was that his commitment to the job wasn’t desired.

That likely was not the intent. But it was the end result of a manager who didn’t listen, who failed to connect with his people, in turn failing to recognize the inherent value that the front line workers brought to the operation.

Ken McCrank taught me long ago that everyone in the organization can and should be a valuable contributor. And shame on the manager who fails in his/her responsibility to connect with them, to engage them in the business, and to build commitment to a common purpose.