Well Managed: Broken Glass

I just spent a few hours picking up broken glass.

I’m fortunate to live in a lovely home on a large lot. The yard is about the size and shape of a football field, 1.2 acres to be precise. It’s like living in a park that happens to be right in the middle of the city.

About a quarter of the backyard is a small forest. It was there when we moved in, a tangle of trees and brush. It had obviously been allowed to grow wild for years. I thought it was pretty cool and my son and his friends loved it. After I cleared out the dead wood they used the forest for playing "airsoft" which is kind of like paintball without the paint. They also used the huge back lawn to practice launching the competition catapults they built each year.

Well, the kids are in college now and suddenly a huge yard seems like a lot of work for no good reason. (Especially since now I’m the one who has to mow it!) It’s time for a smaller yard. We’re moving into our new house this week.

But before we move, I’m doing a final clean-up in the woods. Off in one corner, years ago, someone dumped some windows which, of course, broke into several thousand shards of glass. Over the years the shards have become imbedded in the soil. I’ve spent quite a few hours over the past several weeks picking them out.

My son thinks I’m a little nuts to be spending hours picking broken glass out of a yard we’re about to leave behind us, but it makes perfect sense to me.

People can be categorized in many ways, and here’s one of them: there are three kinds of people in the world: those who break glass, those who see broken glass and do nothing, and those who pick up broken glass.

Years ago, when my kids were toddlers, it struck me that just about the most pure and beautiful sight in the whole world is little kids running around barefoot, laughing and playing. It could be on a lush green lawn or on a warm soft beach or pretty much anywhere. It’s just sweet. Which means that just about the saddest and nastiest thing in the world is for some little kid to cut her soft, pudgy little foot on some broken glass. So I made up my mind that any time I had the opportunity, I would pick up broken glass. I’d do my part to make the world a safer place for bare little toddler feet.

I’ve noticed that it’s the same way with a lot of things in life, for example in the world of business management. Can you think of managers who are the "glass breaker" type? Picture the kind of person who gets a destructive, ugly thrill out of smashing glass, whether by throwing a beer bottle out the window of a car or by throwing a rock through a window. Now picture that person as a manager. Have you ever worked for one of those people? It’s not pleasant. What they leave behind them is worse than broken glass. What they leave behind them is broken people.

Early in the process of building my division, we went through a time when we were continually interviewing candidates from all across the country. The management horror stories we heard from many of those people were an education for us in how not to treat employees.

The truth is that we all have within us the capacity to be destructive, to be indifferent, or to be constructive. We have all felt the momentary rush that comes from smashing something just as we have all been guilty at some time in our lives of an unnecessary cruelty. But we can and should seek to turn away from those impulses and embrace the deeper rewards that come from building, creating, challenging, and encouraging. We all have choices to make about the kind of managers we’re going to be and the kind of lives we’re going to lead. So let’s make best ones we can.