The University of Texas surprised its students in 2014 when it decided to invite a prominent member of the United States Armed Forces, Admiral William Harry McRaven, as a speaker at the graduation ceremony. A surprise that turned into amazement when the military veteran grabbed the microphone and addressed the 8,000 people who were listening to him to tell them that, if they really wanted to change the world, they had to start by making their beds every morning.
According to McRaven, this daily action becomes the first task of the day, and completing it produces a slight feeling of satisfaction that encourages us to continue performing the rest of the tasks successively, until we reach the end of the day. It is also a habit that serves to value the simple things in life, at the same time that it reminds us that if someone does not know how to solve small issues well, it will be difficult for them to do so with big ones. “And if, unfortunately, you have a bad day, at least you will come home and find your bed made,” the well-known admiral ironized in his talk before the graduates.
In any professional activity there are tasks that can be assimilated to making the bed, that is to say, that in appearance are expendable, but that actually have a great symbolic value, capable of directly influencing better management. And it is that there are small routine actions that confer such important powers as exemplarity, empathy, knowledge, humility or self-motivation.
For example, Marta is a shift manager at an automotive component factory. For her, making her bed every morning is like starting the day by walking around the plant, with the aim of greeting each and every one of the workers. Surely it would be more comfortable for him to go straight to her office, without further ado, but she has imposed this daily habit to be close to the team, stay connected to the reality of the factory and capture the key elements that help her in making the decision. of decisions.
Marta could save her daily commute. In the same way that we can leave the house without making the bed. In fact, they are part of this type of action that does not produce a tangible and immediate result, so it is often tempting to place them in the drawer of minor tasks, where they usually end up disappearing. But the reality is that if Marta did not greet the team members every morning, she would not have been able to turn her shift into the most efficient one in the group’s factories.
We all have the great professional challenge of making a good selection of habits, without limiting ourselves to a strictly quantitative prism, but understanding our responsibility in a holistic way, where attributions of a different nature can have a place. Like Marta, who has built a plan that includes meeting with Sandra (the general manager) to find out about the company’s guidelines, but also talking to José (worker on line 1) to find out how his son’s illness is progressing.
People often talk about the difficulties that some leaders have in delegating tasks, but there is also the opposite side, that of those managers who are too easily stripped of what smacks of routine without power. In these cases, they should be reminded of the slogan popularized by a well-known brand of beer: “Whoever said you have to escape from routines, it’s not that he made a mistake in the phrase, it’s that he made a mistake in routines.”
