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“Refill People’s Pitchers”
If you are in the business of serving other people, the one thing to note is that it is emotionally draining. It’s like you have a water pitcher and you are constantly pouring from your pitcher into other people’s glasses. And if you’re not disciplined and intentional about making sure to refill your pitcher, you’re gonna run out of water to pour very, very quickly. We all have the thing that fills our pitcher and we just need to name it in order to make sure that we continue doing it.
For my wife, filling her pitcher means going on a long run. That’s not mine. For me, I like to binge-watch bad TV and order Chinese food. I’m an extrovert who’s constantly with other people. Sometimes the thing I need is just time by myself. I always encourage leaders to make sure that they don’t only know the thing that fills their pitcher, but they also know what fills the pitcher of every single person on their team. Because then and only then can you play the role appropriately in encouraging those around you to make sure that they are taking the time to keep their pitchers filled.
“Touch the Lapel”
One of the issues with top performers, the people who are hard-chargers on your team and very proud of how much they can accomplish is they have a very difficult time asking for help. They think it’s a sign of weakness. And yet if people don’t ask for help, they are inevitably in some way shape or form letting the entire company down. Rather than simply expect people who were not inclined to ask for help to suddenly change into people who were comfortable doing it, we decided to destigmatize it. And so instead we introduced sign language. If I was anywhere in the dining room and someone made eye contact with me from across the room and touched their lapel, I would go to them and offer my help without them ever having to use the words. If you want them to ask for help and you know that they struggle to do so, give them a different way to ask for it.
“Deep Breathing Club”
In any business, there’s moments where things just get overwhelming and when the people on your team get too overwhelmed that they can’t get control of their emotions, it becomes problematic. And our role is to figure out a way to get people to take that deep breath. To get them to calm down. But have you ever said calm down to someone who’s already overwhelmed? It’s the equivalent of pouring lighter fluid onto an already burning fire. We tried to come up with a different way to tell people to calm down to get them to relax in those moments. And I found the answer through my friend Andrew Tepper.
Andrew worked at a psychiatric hospital in the Hudson Valley just north of New York. And he found that the doctors were really overprescribing medications, sedatives when their patients were having meltdowns. He went back to his parents’ house where he still had a silk screening equipment from when he was a kid and made these t-shirts that said DBC. He made them look very, very cool. Went back to the hospital with one of these shirts and said, “Hey, the first person to overcome a potential meltdown three times in a row through deep breathing alone gets one of these t-shirts.” Within a few months, half of the kids in the hospital were wearing one of these t-shirts. And the amount of sedatives prescribed had gone down exponentially.
Andrew recognized a couple things. That coming up with a different way to communicate yielded a better result. That deep breathing, the power of a deep breath is one of the most profound things we can do during those moments that we’re overwhelmed. After I heard about him doing that, from that point forward all you needed to say to someone else in the restaurant when they were melting down was, “Hey, DBC.” And just because it was using a different phrase than “calm down,” it had the desired impact without all the terrible side effects.