The cabinet doors (a tale of overfunctioning?)
I live in a house with two other humans who seem pathologically incapable of closing cabinet doors. It’s a little thing: it offends my sense of order. It’s also a big thing: at 6’4”, I’m really likely to bump my head into an open cabinet door I’m not expecting. Especially in the dark.
So I’m known to walk around after my wife or daughter has been in a room, grumbling to myself or even out loud as I shut everything behind them. Order is restored, and I’m less likely to injure myself when I go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
Maybe I’m being helpful around the house, with a slight twinge of resentment from time to time. How could they not notice? How could they not care? Even when I raise the issue, it’s a bit of a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
What I know to be certain: no one else in my house will focus on the open cabinet doors, or get into a better habit of closing them, as long as I’m around to do it instead. My overfunctioning is enabling their underfunctioning. And the pattern will continue for as long as we own cabinets.
The alternative isn’t comforting: I pick a day, or a week, just ignore the situation and see what happens. Our dishes and spice rack will be exposed to the world, and I’ll probably get a welt or two on my forehead from those late-night bathroom visits. But we just might see some change.
I’ve told this story to leaders who have smiled and nodded their heads as they pictured similar situations both at home and at work.
If you’re the one who is always picking up the slack, others around you will rely on you to do that more often. If you’re covering for an underperforming team member by just doing their work yourself, they will not improve their performance. And if you’re working harder or longer than you feel you should, it’s hard to make the case for more resources when everything looks from the outside like it’s all going smoothly.
In all of those situations, you are the only one with an incentive for anything to change. So it’s on you to initiate the change until others notice.
What’s a cabinet door you can leave open today?
Coaching prompts:
When do you feel like you need to do things that are actually someone else’s responsibility?
What would happen if you didn’t do these things? If nobody did these things?
Want more analogies? My newest book, Embrace Your Inner Peaches: 52 More Analogies for Leadership, Coaching and Life, is on sale now!
Image: Kotivalo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons