Had an interesting situation come up during the generator pull at Quinabaug. I've already mentioned that we messed up the rigging job and ended up being lucky the generator wasn't damaged. I also explained how we were supposed to have done it. If I knew how we were supposed to have done it, why did we mess it up?
Good question. Of course, I didn't know that was how to do it until after, when I asked someone, "what should we have done?" Turns out the guy I asked, Mr. P, was an expert rigger who had rigged everything under the sun in a huge variety of situations. Mr. P was trained by the best and knew his stuff. I kept things easy while talking to him, I knew nothing about it beyond basic physics so I listened to his insight with an open mind and asked a lot of questions to educate myself. I did, however, refrain from asking one question: "Why didn't we do that?"
It still bugs me. Mr. P was right in the middle of the rigging operation. Why didn't he speak up? Was it because he wasn't specifically in charge? Was it just a mistake like everyone else made? I'm not sure. I suspect the former. My father, who is "in charge", specified that the rigging was another guy's responsibility. Did Mr. P take that (too) seriously and defer everything to the designated leader? He's good at what he does but he's not exactly a people person.
I spend three years leading a team where EVERY person who worked for me was a leader. A leader who was trained to speak up if something was not going the way they thought it should, regardless of who was calling the shots. For someone working on a job to NOT act that way feels absurd, yet that may be the new situation I'm in.
You can bet I'll be looking for ways to change that mentality.
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