Leadership Lessons from the Shopping Cart

Hello All,

I love a catchy title! I know you must wonder from time to time if I have lost my mind! (Well, Bob might tell you that would actually be a factual statement!) It is more that sometimes there are things that catch my attention and/or make me think about topics differently. And this week it was the picture of a shopping cart sitting by itself in the parking lot…..…..with this quote “I don’t know one successful person who leaves their cart in the middle of the parking lot.”

Has that made you stop and think about how you treat shopping carts? I think I know how I treat them, but I needed a reality check and asked Bob how I treat shopping carts. “Do you mean how you return them and then try to rearrange them in a row? Or you make me pick them up with you in the parking lot on our way in the stores?” Yep, figured I’d better stop that conversation before we went too far! LOL. I am sort of OCD-ish about the shopping carts!

Though I can’t find an author for this quote, Deb Sofield, a national speaker and coach, uses it in her sessions on leadership. She likes to grocery shop and she notes that from picking up the cart to making sure it gets back to the appropriate place at the end is part of the experience/job of shopping.  She notes that  great leaders don’t leave work undone, and, as she notes: “I am someone who likes to finish the job.” 

I like to finish the job too, but often the completion of the jobs in leadership take a long time. There are rarely few one-day wins. It is why I like washing dishes – and one of the reasons I put shopping carts back in their little corrals or in the store. There are other reasons though. I think about the people who have to walk around (rain, snow or shining sun) hunting down carts. A cart that I can easily take a few minutes to put back…..since I was the one who picked it up. I worry about the person who has limited capacity to park and/or walk who drives up to find a cart in the middle of a prime parking space. (And if the parking space is prime, someone really did have time to put it up!) I even carry the bags out and leave the cart in the store when I can. I know this takes me only seconds, but it has the potential to impacts someone’s day. It can make the difference in making a tedious job just a little bit better.

I even had a conversation this past week about putting trash in trash cans! And if you miss, you need to pick it up and put it into the trash receptacle. It takes seconds. And it demonstrates that you want to finish the job – and not leave it for someone else to clean up. It means you are respectful of property, other people’s jobs, and you care.

Author William H. McRaven put it a slightly different way: “If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.” And Hunter Carter, a Council member in Louisiana, puts it even more bluntly: “If you’re too big to do the small things, you’re too small to do the big things.”

It’s not 100% about the shopping cart. It is about how you finish the job, no matter how long it takes. It is about whether you finish what you started, or ask others to pick it up. It is about whether you leave the cart where others can be hurt by it. It is about how you handle the issues/projects/things that are important to your team and/or your team’s “health”. It is about whether you leave the cart out all of the time, whether you have deliberately neglected it.

If you are a leader, there really are no small things. Someone is watching you to see what you do, how you handle things. What you think may be a little job is a job of huge consequence to another. You completing the tasks, providing support, answering questions, leading the way – being the role model – makes a difference in big and small ways. You taking that extra minute to put that cart up – priceless.

So what will you do the next time with your shopping cart? How successful are you?

Phyl