“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.”
— Confucius
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Rat Kabobs
I grew up on a hobby farm. It was really my grandpa’s hobby farm, but it was at our house in the country. We had horses, chickens, dogs, and cats. Somewhere along the way our family tried its luck with goats and rabbits. Those are stories for another day.
Today starts with the chickens. When you keep chickens, you also end up attracting every county-critter looking for a meal. Fox, raccoons, mink, and the worst of the bunch, rats. They steal eggs, and depending on the visitor, they kill your hens. A chicken coop is like a buffet without the cashier guarding the door, and the wildlife knows it.
Grandpa Slim had a nice little chicken coop. He made sure the hens were fed, the nesting boxes had straw, and the doors and fence seemed secure. But the egg count kept falling. Grandpa started noticing a cracked shell sucked dry, then another, then some droppings along the wall. These were the tell-tale signs of rats. Under that dirt floor, Hogan’s Heroes style, they’d dug a whole network of tunnels, and the hens up top were stressing about their filthy company.
Grandpa Slim had seen all he needed to see. He never shied away from a dirty job, and this most certainly fit that bill. Dressed in his overalls and work boots, he choose his tool. Not knowing what he had in store for him, but with enough foresight to give him a hunch of what might be coming, he grabbed the pitchfork. A pitchfork is usually used to move light materials, like hay and silage. This pitchfork was about to have a career change.
Grandpa shooed the chickens outside, closed the door and windows. He stood alone in the coop with whatever was waiting beneath his boots. Then he drove the fork into the dirt floor. And again. It didn’t take long. Loose dirt flew, then rats flew, then rat parts flew. Everywhere. EVERYWHERE. What started as exploratory turned urgent in a hurry. Plenty of people - most certainly me included - would have dropped the fork and ran for the hills. Grandpa went faster. Every plunge turned up more of them, and every one he turned up made him drive the pitchfork into the earth with more energy and more intention. In a moment Bubba Gump would appreciate, there were scared rats, angry rats, protective rats, fleeing rats, dead rats, and rat kabobs skewered on the tines. Some got away. Many did not. By the family’s count, more than a hundred rats lost their lives in that coop on a day that continues to live in infamy.
Look at what Grandpa skipped. He didn’t put out extra feed or give the hens a talk about effort. Nobody formed an egg-production committee, and the nesting boxes stayed right where they were. The hens were doing what hens do, so he left them alone.
He went after what was stealing the eggs.
I’ve been around teams a long time, and I’m not sure there’s a more common coaching mistake than asking the chickens to lay more eggs while the rats work the floor below. When results slip, we reach for what we can see, like a longer practice or another speech about toughness. Sometimes that’s exactly right. But eggs are evidence, and they rarely tell you the whole story.
What’s tunneling under us is rarely a person. It’s the misunderstanding gone unchecked, or the standard everyone knows and nobody enforces.
Going after the real thing usually gets messy. Ask one honest question and three more come up out of the dirt, older and deeper than the one you went looking for. Some of that mess is on us, because we pick the wrong moment or the wrong words. Either way, don’t mistake the mess for a reason to stop probing. Grandpa didn’t get every rat, but got enough of them to change the coop. It’s safe to say, the rats got a clear message that day.
Every so often the tunnels run under our own feet. It might be the conversation we’ve been putting off too long, or the habit which needs to change. Those steal eggs too, but most likely nobody is coming with a pitchfork for them. That needs to be you.
All of us need to take a walk through our own chicken coop to identify what missing eggs you have been explaining away, and what you have been asking people to do better when something underneath is making better harder.
Grandpa Slim didn’t know exactly what was under that dirt floor when he walked into the coop. He just knew the eggs were telling him something was there. So he pulled on his overalls, tied his boots up tightly, closed the doors, and went looking for the real problem.
You probably won’t need a pitchfork, but you might need the overalls.
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
— Henry David Thoreau
Connecting this quote to the story. Too often we attack the visible symptoms—the branches—when real leadership requires digging beneath the surface and addressing the root of what’s causing the problem.
This week’s Chasing Influence tip: Don’t confuse the symptom with the problem. The right solution starts with understanding the real problem.