VIM Executive Coaching has had the incredible pleasure of coaching business people from nearly every walk of life.
As our post for this week will unfold, we must start “the story” with an image that triggered a memory. The image is a stack of bricks; red, rectangular clay bricks. The story associated with those bricks was the immigrant father of one of our clients.
The laborer arrived in America between WWI and WWII. The only job he could secure was in a brick making factory located along the Hudson River of New York. It was brutal work, dangerous work and low-paying work with no benefits. Brick making is one of the lowest-tech jobs we can imagine.
Clay, binders and sand, combined with water, and baked in kilns under intense heat, produced the bricks that by-and-large built Manhattan; from townhouses to commercial buildings to skyscrapers.
When our client was a small child, barely more than a toddler, he and his parents would often visit Manhattan and marvel at the architecture. He and his father would sometimes walk past a building and his father would say, “Son, this is my brick. I built this with my hands.”
The Father
The father went off to war and luckily survived, gained his citizenship and discovered brickmaking, along with many other professions had died. He understood hard work though, and found employment in the building trades, often working on homes and retail stores made of brick. With much effort, the father became a contractor-builder. He owned a modest business.
Our client, the son of the brickmaker, gained entry to college, we would suppose, on the back of his father’s labor. The son still carries the work ethic of the father though his field is high-tech, as he still sells diagnostic products to hospitals and healthcare practices.
When our client first came in for coaching, he would treat us to stories of how his father always took the time to listen to people, how he never forgot his roots, and would invariably help those who were loyal.
“Until he was an old man and moderately successful,” said our client, “my father and mother would walk the city streets, hand-in-hand and point out buildings that used the brick from the brickyard.”
The son, our client, remembered that some number upwards of 250 attended the father’s funeral. Among them were strangers, business connections and old-time, fellow immigrants who all had stories of the brickmaker.
He was right there
Of the praises heaped on the father, were the simple accolades of “his presence,” “his involvement,” his awareness of problems good and bad. It was, in fact, the essence of mindfulness.
The father was empathic to the lives of his employees, immigrants and otherwise, because he, himself, remembered the pollution of the brickmaking furnaces, the job injuries, the coldness of management along with the poor wages. He understood, in the moment, and the struggle people have to make an impact in this world.
The lessons with all of the stories and interactions with our client, was the incredible power of being present, aware and authentic. As business coaches, we have encountered far too many situations where employees have encountered management with the opposite values. As a rule, the organizations experience constant turnover and organizational resent.
Management perpetually blames such turnover on everything from Millennial and Gen-Z “lack of values and engagement,” to social media and cell phones. Our view and examination of the issues does not support such judgment. The lack of engagement, people skills, mindfulness and basic compassion within modern organizations are often the reasons potentially great employees walk off jobs.
We are all at a modern-day cross roads and it is not about “technology.” It is much more organic than that, rather the problems beg for greater humanity and authenticity in the work place. Mindfulness and connection sublimely understand the difference between hastily passing a beautiful building and another to appreciate those who built it “brick by brick.”