Today's Reading
INTRODUCTION
As first days go, Alexander Vasiliev's was among the very worst. By the end of his shift working as a security guard at the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center in Yekaterinburg, Russia, he had cost his employer more than $3,000, faced criminal charges, and made the international news—and all it took to wreak so much havoc was a pen. Bored, Vasiliev drew two pairs of eyes on the blank faces in Anna Leporskaya's avant-garde masterpiece Three Figures. The painting was valued at nearly $1 million and on loan from the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Vasiliev was fired, along with the security firm, and they ended up paying for the painting's restoration. When asked about his little doodle, er, act of vandalism, Vasiliev said he didn't know the paintings were valuable, he didn't like them, and, oh yeah, some schoolgirls egged him on to draw on the faces. Sure, dude.
More than five thousand miles away, Ben Bjork, a security guard at the Baltimore Museum of Art, had a very different job experience. For years, he'd stared at 50 Dozen by artist Jeremy Alden, a chair made out of six hundred No. 2 pencils. Bjork had fantasized about sitting in the chair, but he never made a move to do so, because he knew he couldn't. He and his fellow guards had a deep respect for the art.
Then museum board member Amy Elias came up with the idea to invite the guards to curate their own exhibition, "Guarding the Art." Over the years-long preparation, the security sentinels made all the decisions about the show, from which pieces would be on display to the color of the paint on the walls. As they gained a better understanding of the process, they learned about the need for art to work harmoniously and fluidly; they also came to better understand their role at the museum. Now they have a different view of their relationship to the art.
Traci Archable-Frederick, a security guard who chose the contemporary collage piece Resist #2 by Mickalene Thomas, said, "I'm very proud of this piece, as if it I did it myself." As for Bjork, he chose the chair he'd been thinking about for so long. He had always protected the piece, and now he wanted to celebrate it. In his label copy, he stated: "I chose 50 Dozen in part because it's funny for me to think of a chair that would break if you actually sat on it, like it's a prank on the tired guards."
As business leaders, we search high and low for employees who give more, do more, and want more, like the security guards at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and yet we more commonly end up with people who take a Sharpie to our priceless masterpiece—if we can find any candidates at all. And because we don't have a solid team, we spend way too much time and money trying to find better people and keep the employees we do have. If we're lucky, we have a couple awesome people on staff, yet their work is compromised because their coworkers don't pull their weight.
Throw in disruption—a global health emergency, generational divide, shifting work standards and policies—and staffing your company, much less building a team that rocks it every day, is a relentless struggle. It seems as though most days are like managing unruly adolescents, and as soon as you get a handle on them, someone mucks it all up again for the team. All this volatility is hard enough on corporations; for small businesses, it can be devastating.
Since I wrote my first book in 2008, I have devoted myself to helping entrepreneurs like me, the people who started their businesses and ran them. Then the call came from one of those megacorporations: Guardian Insurance. Maria Ferrante-Schepis was tasked with figuring out how to build a sales team who adored their clients, cared for the company, and were all in on their job. Yes, Guardian had done years of research and found some interesting stuff. But it was big corporate stuff. What this HR leader wanted was the secret that successful small businesses—like mine, and those of so many entrepreneurs I had gotten to know—had figured out. Huh. A big company wants to know how we do it? At first I was surprised, but then I realized their interest made sense.
Small businesses don't offer employees huge ladders to climb. The work is not steady. Micro-enterprises can rarely win a compensation offer battle. And we can't hide hiring mistakes with "fill-in-the-blank" positions. We are underfunded and underresourced, and yet many entrepreneurs pull it off. Some small companies are stacked with "A-players," yet the reason why is not so obvious.
I thought about my colleagues and other small-business owners who have remarkable, loyal, and motivated teams. They don't have employees who kill time until they can clock out or do the bare minimum until they can find a "better" job. They have rock-star employees who can do the job they were hired to do, who love their work, and who seek ways to contribute and solve problems. Employees who are all in, who care as much about the companies they work for as the owners do.
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