Rake Constantly

I find it interesting when companies don’t think they can learn from other companies outside their industries. Especially since I recently learned something watching the landscape company I hired to cut down dead trees in our yard.

As I watched the small crew work, it was a 4 member crew; I noticed that at least one was raking up debris constantly through the process. As I began to watch I wondered if the job could be done cheaper with fewer people? Do they really need 4 people? I know none of you have ever seconded guessed a contractor while there were doing a project.

While I watched the crew I realized that the tree removal was never messy.

• Large branches were cut down. The branches were hauled off and shredded and the mess was raked every time the ground was free of branches.
• Sections of the trunk of the tree were cut off. A small “gator” took the sections to a spot in the back yard where they were stacked (for the family to cut and split). All the debris was raked as each section was mover. 
• The stump was removed, the final mess was raked and the ground was smoothed over the location the tree once occupied.

I was amazed at how fast these 4 individuals removed 4 fully grown (although dead) trees plus 3 other stumps in less than 5 hours. I mentioned to the owner that I was surprised how quickly they removed the trees. The owner told me that they usually use a crew of 3 people but they found that by adding one person to their crew they were able to get more accomplished in a day.

Of course I don’t have access to their numbers, but I firmly believe that if they didn’t have the 4^th member the project would have taken as least 2 more hours. Which I would assume would mean that the company would not have been able to do another contract.

But the bigger lesson for me was what the seeing the cost of choosing to ignore the “raking”. Even though at the time it doesn’t seem to be really important urgent and there will be time to do it later. But that is where I get in trouble because it just piles up.

When working with organizations I find that managers tend to not “rake” up the mess in their interactions with each other and their staff. I’ve heard many times “it is not a big deal, I’ll wait till it is something big before we talk about it.” Until we learn to “rake” the debris and get rid of it, our relationships will continue to get more cluttered. And unfortunately that is usually when an issue becomes a wildfire and burns through the entire organization turning it to ash.

Make 2011 the year you are going to start “raking” up issues constantly before the chaos causes wild fires in your organization.