In 1933, Joseph Siwek lost his railroad job. It was the middle of the Great Depression, and families in Minnesota needed firewood to heat their homes. Joseph started dismantling old wooden boxcars, pulling nails, and selling the scrap wood as firewood.
I spent a day with the leadership team at Siwek Lumber & Millwork in Jordan, Minnesota, four generations later. The company is growing fast. Of the three sessions I facilitated that day, Leadership Compass is the one I keep connecting back to those boxcars. We were working on how to put core values into words. Joseph’s story gives those words a picture.
Take adaptability. That word could show up on the wall of just about any business in Minnesota. Now picture a man who just lost his railroad job looking at an old boxcar and seeing something a family could use to get through the winter. That’s a story you could tell a new employee on their first day. It gives the two of you something to talk about.
And if I were the one telling it, I’d want to leave time for the next question. Where does somebody on this team have a chance to do that today?
That question matters when a company is growing. The people who’ve been around awhile have seen what the team does when a plan falls apart or a customer needs something unexpected. Someone who joined last Tuesday is still figuring out how much room they have to try a different approach. They learn a lot from how their manager handles the first idea they bring forward.
Say someone on your team suggests changing a process that worked well when the company was smaller. Before you explain how that process got started, try asking, “What are you seeing now that we didn’t have to account for when we set it up?” You may decide the process still works. Either way, that person gets to tell you what they’ve noticed, and you get to hear something you might have missed. That’s one way a value like adaptability shows up in an ordinary workday.
Think about a story people still tell where you work. Maybe it goes back four generations. Maybe it happened last month. The next time you tell it, ask your team one more question.
