A few years ago, I was boarding a Southwest Airlines flight from BWI to Hartford.
Now if you’re a Southwest frequent flyer, you know there are no assigned seats. The earlier you board, the better chance you have to get a window or aisle and of course have space to store your roller board in the overhead bins. You also know that most Southwest flights are totally full which means you WILL have someone stuffed into that middle seat next to you. AND, the unwritten rule is there is NO SAVING SEATS!
Only on this flight, two old ladies in the section next to me were saving their middle seat. Time and time again they told someone the seat was reserved. This annoyed me even though it was none of my business. Finally, I loudly exclaimed to no one in particular:
“Ya know, you’re not supposed to save seats on Southwest!”
Then, one of those old ladies looked at me and held up a purple placard.
“My friend is disabled and we PAID for this middle seat so YES we can save this seat!”
Talk about being embarrassed! Thankfully the flight was a short one and I quickly got off the flight when we landed. My assumption caused me a great deal of embarrassment.
The key to building winning workplace relationships between Boss and employee is to start by managing assumptions. That’s easier said than done.
Most psychologists agree that when we enter a room, we first notice skin color and then gender. That’s normal. What happens next in our mind comes from conscious and unconscious bias. This dictates how we manage that contact. We might be drawn to the person or repulsed. In the case of the old ladies on the Southwest flight, I chose to be annoyed even though I didn’t know their story.
As The Boss, keep this in mind when that new employee begins their first day on the job. They may be a total stranger but they are your stranger to connect to. Remember in our opening post that the great coach/quarterback relationships in the NFL all had a first-day-on-the-job experience. See that new employee as just that, a new human that you have the responsibility to develop into a productive member of a winning team. In the next 13 days, we’ll give you the formula to do just that, but a wrong perception will ground you to a halt right now. Don’t let it happen to you.