Staffing Guideline

Staffing Guideline

Many very gifted people are born into a situation that will never, and I mean never either see, appreciate or develop whatever natural gifts they may have. It has been my privilege to work with a handful of very fine people whose lot in life has kept them among the working poor, not by any deficiencies on their part, but because they were/are simply trapped. But being trapped does not stop them from doing simple, hard, honorable work consistently well. These people are the foundation of this and every other economy in the world.

I have also seen what can happen when people come into this country as immigrants - torn from their homelands for any number of reasons, unable to speak English - and become very high achievers. I learned long ago that what we like to think of as "intelligence" is nothing more than an intellectual construct, normally used when we need to put someone down and don't have the courage to admit that what is really at stake is our own inability to help them.

Story: When I first started in the cafeteria business I noticed one day the contrast between a very old employee and one of the high school kids working part-time.

The old lady was slow and physically limited. She wobbled as she walked and trembled so badly that we couldn't let her serve vegetables because she would either get burned or burn someone else with spilled hot vegetable juice from the little bowls. But she could serve bread okay and keep up with the dessert station. She also answered the phone nearby with "Thank you for calling [company name], this is Blanche. How may I help you?" Unfailingly gracious and polite, her uniform always neat, she was a model employee who would do anything I asked cheerfully and to the best of her ability.

High school and college kids are a wonderful resource because they are quick to catch on, fast and efficient, and much easier to cross-train than older people. So this kid was all over the place, carving meat, back in the dishroom rolling silverware, out in the dining room clearing tables, learning to do the checker's job making tickets for people at the end of the line...whatever was needed. I realized two things. First, the old lady had been there for years and the kid was just hired, probably just for the summer, yet their pay was only slightly different (we are paid for the job we do, not our abilities, and the rate is set by the marketplace, not the proprietor). Second, the actual productivity of the kid was a lot more than that of the old lady.

Thinking about that I came to the conclusion that the gracious manners, mature example and model attitude of one was a fair trade-off for the measurable productivity of the other. I decided that my expectations should be changed from "Do as much or more than everybody else" to "Bring to this job your individual best, whatever that might be. "

You might notice that what we call "intelligence" has nothing to do with valuable contributions. Those who think in those terms need to take a closer look at how they assess people, beginning with the "mentally-challenged" individual bagging groceries and continuing until they will themselves face challenges, if they are lucky, as the result of getting old.

I wrote these thoughts at my first blog twenty years ago. I'm making another copy because I lost control of that blog years ago (long story) and I don't want this to get lost.