It’s been a busy few months for Lough Shore and Options; so much so that a number of blog posts have remained in my Drafts folder a little longer than planned. The one below is certainly a case in point and while it’s a snapshot from a couple of months back, I still think it’s worth sharing.
–
A late Easter can be a beautiful thing in Northern Ireland, six weeks from the middle of April to the end of May is the only time of the year when statistically, we get more sunshine than the Southeast of England. Generally, the sun comes between the long, grey winter and yet another wet summer and when the Easter holidays fall in the second half of April the odds of sunshine are pretty good.
When I was younger Easter school holidays were spent on the farm. It was always a time of preparation; mending fences before the cattle are let out, sowing barley or grass-seed and spreading fertiliser. We also kept a plot of potatoes and vegetables for the family, so the potato planter would get a run-out. We’d work outside for two weeks, then go back to school with a deep tan, and everyone would assume we’d been away on a sun holiday.
This Easter was a classic. Everyone was depressed as a wet spring followed the wettest winter in a hundred years. Then the sun came out and the last few days have been spectacular.
My 18-month-old son and I were out at my Dad’s for a lot of the break, dabbling with a little farming in the good weather. He loves the “quad” and is mad for the tractor and the digger. We got to work and rolled his first field.
As we started out I felt a slight pull at the heart strings as it reminded me of a Good Friday evening over thirty years ago when I was ten or eleven-years-old. We had work to do over the holiday, but my Dad was away, so I seized the initiative, hitched the “roller” to the tractor, and went out to make a start rolling that same field. Unfortunately, I got distracted, underestimated the width of the roller and it caught on the fence. I didn’t notice and, hey presto, ten seconds later I had pulled down about a hundred meters of fencing.
The next morning my Dad taught me a lesson I’ve never forgotten – don’t punish people for using their initiative, even if it goes (very) wrong!
Rather than shouting, or rubbing my nose in it by making me fix the fence while my brother did the rolling (at 10 or 11-years-old doing the tractor work was very cool), he thanked me for making a start, and asked me to continue rolling the field while he rebuilt the fence. Message received loud and clear! And needless to say, I haven’t caught another fence since.
How does a broken fence relate to team development? Over the years I’ve tended towards hiring a much higher percentage of graduates than the firms we were competing with. It’s a simple approach; hiring grads for attitude and enthusiasm, giving them the latitude to take responsibility, make mistakes and learn from them. It was the cornerstone of how we built the team at Wombat back in the day and it’s an outlook that I continue to employ and encourage today, both within Lough Shore and across the wider LSI portfolio, including Options.
It’s a simple philosophy – nobody gets fired for showing a bit of initiative, whatever happens – and I’ve found it to be a very successful one, though every once in a while, we may need to rebuild a few fences.
– Danny