When managers don't notice the little things

Earlier today I had a situation which has created some, shall we say, distrust with a person in an upper-level management position. Distrust may be too strong of a word, but they at least rubbed me the wrong way. We'll look at this as a teaching/learning moment in management skills: noticing when people do the little things.

For the past six or seven months, I have been a member of the IT Planning committee, a weekly gathering of managers in IT to discuss all projects that are submitted to IT. It's a comprehensive group of people, with members and decision-makers representing each of the IT departments, as well as IT Leadership. The room in which we meet has a large table with a dozen leather chairs, and about a dozen other stacked mesh bottom chairs. I always arrive at 8:00am for this 8:30 meeting (my personal office is across campus, so I just go to the meeting at the start of my day and go through email). Since I'm always the first to arrive, I unstack the chairs and place them around the room, because we fill up every seat, every week. For the past month, I have led this meeting as the facilitator, and as such, make sure that all of the chairs are unstacked and positioned.

Except this week, I had not gotten to it yet. Whether it was my bruised ribs, or dislocated shoulder from the weekend, it was 8:15 and I had not gotten the chairs out. There is no rule on this committee as to who is supposed to unstack the chairs... people usually grab them as they come in. This one manager walked in, and began unstacking the chairs, making a comment on how this other manager (who was sitting in the room working at their computer) and myself had not done this, and that they were going to do this so no one would have to cause a commotion and interrupt the meeting when they arrived and tried to find a seat. There was inference that we should help this person, or should have already done this, and that they were doing something extraordinary by unstacking the chairs. Somewhat disturbed, I commented that for the past three months, I had come in early and unstacked all the chairs before the meeting, but had not gotten to it yet this week. Their response was, 'Well, if you say so, but last week the chairs were all stacked up,' as they continued to unstack the chairs with attitude.

I can assure you that last week, and the week prior (and all the weeks back several months) the chairs were unstacked and available for people to use. This nonchalant comment got a rise out of me, but then I realized: the reason they are saying this is because they never noticed that the chairs were unstacked, until they were left stacked. In essence, people do not notice a thing until it is not done. By unstacking the chairs every week, no one noticed, but the week that they are left stacked, suddenly they have always been stacked.

As a manager, people need to pay attention to the little things. Why did I unstack the chairs every week? Mostly because I arrived to the room early and once the meeting began I did not want there to be interruptions behind me with people getting chairs. Maybe I did it so that one day it would be recognized, and I could take comfort in someone noticing that I had done one little thing to make our meeting start more efficiently. But now, a manager in a high position had just called me out, not believing, caring, or even thanking me, but rather in attitude and voice, saying that something I did... never happened.

And that is what managers need to be careful about. We need to take notice when our staff do things, no matter the size. We need to provide recognition to these small things, so that the staff will continue to do the small things. What we don't need is to not believe or blow off their small things, and put them into a position where they don't think they are valued. Even something as small as unstacking chairs...