Have you ever watched Undercover Boss?
 
The other night found myself watching four episodes in a row of Undercover Boss… and obviously loved it.
 
My biggest take away from all four shows was the best employees had low end of the totem pole jobs, didn’t make much more than minimum wage, was a single parent of 2-3 kids and often one was special needs, plus worked 2-3 jobs to support the family.  
 
The jobs were:
 
Warehouse Maintenance – a nice word for being responsible for cleaning all of the bathrooms in the building.  This guy not only cleaned all of the bathrooms, he took it upon himself to do some other menial jobs in another department.  Why?  Because he said to get the next job you want you need to act the part.  So he was actually doing the job he really wanted – on his own!
 
Road Maintenance – another great title for the one person in the city who was dispatched throughout the entire city to remove road kill.  He did this without GPS, without a partner to help pick up big dead deer or dogs, no tools except his hands with gloves and garbage bags.
 
Floor sales – responsible for pricing items, finding price checks and keeping the racks straight and when the store got extra busy she was given register duty.  All of this with little to no technology to use and get this only 1 of the 5 cash registers could take credit cards!  She was also told not to chat up to the customers as that took time away from doing her job.  Yes, you read that right!  She was very unhappy about that directive.
 
Shipping – in charge of manually gathering the items a client purchased from warehouse shelves, packing each, placing the boxes on a pallet, shrink wrapping the pallet and using a pallet jack truck – move the pallets to the loading dock.
 
In each case – these are not ideal jobs – yet each person did them with gusto, pride and perfectionism.  
 
This is a perfect example of Achievement Drive!  They could have all of the excuses in the world to not perform… only they chose to out-perform.
 
Their skin in the game was their children and needing a roof and food.
 
They dug down deep, believed they were capable, became committed to activities, found their own value in what they were doing and made success in their world for themselves.
 
All I could say was WOW and kudos to these employees.
 
• Do you know what drives your reps to go out every day and get more rejection than many other jobs?
 
• When was the last time you did someone else’s job to understand how it impacts the company and your reps productivity and success?
 
• What lessons are you willing to discover by taking on the Undercover Boss challenge?
 
Of course the purpose of the show is to demonstrate deficiencies in a company by the boss doing the manual labor and for the boss to learn first hand about the people working for them.
 
Maybe it’s time you spent some time shadowing those folks – or better yet – have them teach you’re their job (like in Undercover Boss) and learn first hand what’s working and what’s not for the future growth of your company!