Justin Wexler: Building Settlements in the Desert

A little under a week ago I volunteered, along with twenty-nine of my colleagues, for Habitat for Humanity.  Before I go an further, I just need to mention a couple of things:

1) Habitat is a terrific organization and I had an absolutely blast volunteering for them;

and

2) Building a home in Phoenix was the most Jewish thing I've done since Birthright.

The reason I'm writing tonight, however, is not to shower praise on Habitat for Humanity or Jews building settlements in the West Bank.  The reason I'm writing tonight is to relate the experience back to- you guessed it- Thinking & Creativity.

It didn't hit me right away, but after reflecting on the experience I began to notice a parallel between the manual labor I had blissfully performed throughout the day and Marcus Buckingham's Attitude Adjustment #5.  For my readers whom aren't in the know, Marcus Buckingham's Attitude Adjustment #5 can be summed up in the following paragraph from Polly LaBarre's article in the December 19th, 2007 issue of Fast Company:

We say that we want to build world-class organizations.  That's meaningless if we don't value world-class performance in every role.  Yet the people who touch customers the most -- hotel housekeepers, outbound telemarketers -- get the least respect and the lowest paychecks.  The assumption is that anyone can do that job and that nobody would want to do it if they were given a choice to do something else.  Frontline talent has a prestige problem, and it's turning into a corporate-performance problem.

Before I go on it will likely be helpful to describe what I spent most of day with Habitat doing.  It's pretty complicated stuff, so try to stay with me:

I hammered nails into pieces of wood.

I did a few other odd jobs here and there, but the vast majority of my time was spent nailing together various pieces of wood.  Big pieces, small pieces, 2x4s, 2x6s- you name it.  The crazy thing is how much I enjoyed the simple job that I had been assigned.  Despite the satisfaction I received from the task at hand, this did not change the fact that I- the humble nail hammerer- represented the absolute lowest tier of the Habitat hierarchy.  I wasn't a board member, a regional director, a project leader, or even a power tool operator.  I was the guy that Habitat for Humanity Central Arizona had picked up off the streets of Tempe (kind of) and assigned the simplest duty possible within their organization (only after signing an unbelievable comprehensive waiver of liability, of course).  Now consider this quote also from the LaBarre article:

Unfortunately, the only way we have to reward excellence on the front lines is to promote people out of the very roles that they do best.  We turn great housekeepers into supervisors, virtuoso shelf stockers into salespeople, and managers into leaders.  A major challenge for CEOs is to define excellence in every role -- and pay on it, award titles on it, distribute prestige on it, and make it a genuine career choice.

Granted, non-profits- especially ones with a substantial volunteer workforce- likely appreciate the work of their lower tier employees at least slightly more than for-profit corporations.  None the less, working this role- and genuinely enjoying it- made me realize the truth in Marcus Buckingham's argument.