Think Like an Owner: Snow Days
Ten days after writing about how we should embrace our midwestern winters, God has certainly given us one! Here in Chicago, as in much of the Midwest, we have received over a foot of snow with several days of windchills in the -20s and below.
Last Friday morning, snow started coming down during the morning commute. I noticed our nearly empty parking lot as I pulled up to our office building. There are offices and cubicles on my floor to seat over 40 people. That day, only four of us were there, all long-time employees: our owner, our head of marketing, a sales team lead, and me.
Earlier in the week, I saw the remote work emails start streaming in from our people. The requests began as a trickle on Tuesday, based on wild forecasts ranging from 1 inch to 15 inches. The pace increased on Wednesday and Thursday, peaking on Friday morning when the first flakes fell. So, I shouldn’t have been surprised that so few of us drove into the office that day.
Our owner came into my office and told me about a meeting with one of our younger programmers earlier that morning. He wondered if the employee would show up at the office since it had snowed. When the young man entered his office, our owner smiled and said, “Well, you passed the first test.” They proceeded to have a terrific conversation, with the first-year programmer getting more time with the owner than he typically would have.
Hearing the story, I told our owner, “And you will always remember that he came into the office on a snow day - when most others didn’t.”
I understand that people live different distances from the office. For some, it probably made no sense to come in that day. But, if you are a young, single employee who chose to stay home in your pajamas - well, you missed a golden opportunity to show how much you cared about the company and your job.
In the last month, I have been reading Ryan Holiday’s “Discipline is Destiny,” hearing tales of such heroes as Marcus Aurelius, George Washington, and Lou Gehrig.
In his “Meditations,” Marcus Aurelius wrote about struggling to get out of bed, asking himself, “Is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”
Gehrig played in an incredible 2,130 consecutive games for the Yankees. Was it because he never got injured or sick? No. Holiday wrote that Gehrig’s hands were X-rayed once, and doctors found at least seventeen healed fractures that he had played through during his streak.
I’m grateful I grew up seeing my dad work through adverse conditions on our Iowa farm. My mom wrote me earlier this week about the blizzard of 1975, the first year we moved out to the farm. She and I watched from our living room window as Dad walked to our barn to do hog chores. He wouldn’t get past the edge of our yard before we lost sight of him because of the blowing snow.
Will a person ever achieve greatness when they can’t even muster enough spirit to drive in a heated vehicle to work in a comfortable office?
What are we teaching our children when they see such behavior? When they see us too lazy or too scared to leave our house? Or when school is canceled 3 or 4 days in a row because of cold temperatures?
We should think of such things the next time we want to take the easy way out.
We must do our part and stiffen our spines to stop this ever-quickening descent into a culture of softness.
Image credit: Shutterstock