Two days ago, I cleaned a dusty shelf in my kitchen. It didn’t take long: I removed all the cups, dampened a towel, and gave it a wipe. Nothing too crazy. I bring it up, though, because the dusty shelf taught me a lesson.
I’m embarrassed to tell you this, but it took me a whole thirty-one days from the moment I identified the issue to act on it. I rationalized my negligence like this:
My fiancée Jess is a tidy and observant person. She must be cool with the dust on this shelf, because she isn’t doing anything about it. So, I’m sure it’s no big deal if I leave it, too.
And then, forty-eight hours ago, the universe finally whispered some sense into my ear. It said, “Max, this shelf sits at your eye level. But don’t forget that Jess is 5’ 2”, and you’re 6’ 1”. She can’t see the dust, you knucklehead. And if she could, she certainly wouldn’t wait 744 hours to complete a two-minute project.”
So, yeah, I felt like a jerk. Not only was I being a poor partner to Jess, I was just straight-up lazy. Not my favorite moment.
So I spent some time unpacking this lesson, hoping to lock it in, and here’s what I realized: stuff like this happens all the time. Especially at work, where bigger teams often lead to more ambiguous responsibilities. Consider this example:
A new campaign is being rolled out! Everyone’s excited. The sales team gets the marketing collateral, and one of the salespeople takes the time to read it. He comes across a term that could be construed as offensive and should be corrected. But instead of speaking up, he has an internal debate, questioning if it’s even an error at all—maybe he doesn’t fully understand the word, or it’s above his head. After all, he got a B in English, and the collateral was written by full-time writers who surely know best! Plus, everyone else on the sales team got the same thing, so one of them will catch it if it’s really a problem. All this rationalization takes place in seconds, and before you know it, the salesperson is back in Salesforce, checking his tasks.
Two weeks later, when a deluge of customers point out the mistake, damage control commences. It’s a nightmare. Everybody wonders how the heck nobody noticed this obvious problem. So the salesperson spends the rest of the day with his headphones on, acting like he’s working hard, when really he just feels terrible for not speaking up.
You get the idea. We second guess ourselves. We kick the can of responsibility. We misinterpret the collective inaction around a problem as a purposeful decision, not an oversight. We fail to remember that sometimes our purview is unique, and that uniqueness matters.
So, learn a lesson on me: If you see something that’s off, either fix it or bring it up. There’s a chance others aren’t aware of the problem. There’s also a chance they’d be grateful to know.
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Max is the CEO and Founder of Lessonly, the world’s leading team learning software. Lessonly helps thousands of learners around the world do better work by translating important company knowledge into lessons that improve team productivity.