When I was in high school (or it could have been soon after; I don’t really remember, and it doesn’t really matter), I got a part-time job at the Don Randall Music Store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It was on my first day that Mr. Randall, in a move that seemed almost magical to me, taught me a great lesson.
It was the end of the day, and we had just closed the store and locked the glass front doors. There were only three of us there, myself, another employee, and Mr. Randall, and we were busy with typical “end of day” jobs: sweeping floors, keeping track of registers, etc. Suddenly, I heard someone knocking on the door.
He looked somewhat ragged and carried a beat-up guitar case. Me, trying to be a good employee following policies on my first day, told him through the glass that we were closed. He said that he just wanted to get some guitar strings. He was about to repeat that we were closed but he could buy some guitar strings tomorrow when Mr. Randall came up behind me and asked what was going on. Shabby Guy repeated her wish to buy some ropes.
Instantly, Mr. Randall opened the door and said, “Let’s get this young man some guitar strings.”
Okay, now here’s the part that blew me away. I went back to sweeping the floor, while Mr. Randall and Shabby Guy went to the guitar section of the store. About twenty minutes later, Shabby Guy leaves. Did she have new guitar strings?
I bet he did. They were hooked up to his new Fender Stratocaster guitar…which he would play through his new Fender Twin Reverb amp.
I looked at Mr. Randall like he was a magician. In twenty minutes, he had turned a $5 sale into a $500 sale, from a guy who wouldn’t have guessed he had more than fifty dollars to his name. Mr. Randall looked at me and said, “Never let politics get in the way of opportunity.”
Never let politics get in the way of opportunity.
That’s good, don’t you think?
What Mr. Randall taught me seems obvious, doesn’t it? The purpose of the Don Randall Music Store was to sell musical instruments, not to close on time.
What is the purpose of your business? Do you, or any of your team members, modify that purpose under the guise of “following the policy”? Is each of your team members very clear about the purpose of the organization they work for? Are you?
A recent survey showed that only one in seven employees could name even one of their organization’s most important goals.
Job #1, then, is to educate your team on the organization’s goals. Don Randall’s goal was to sell musical instruments.
Job #2 is not letting politics get in the way of achieving those goals.