The Crumbled Cookie Effeft!

12/15/10

By TheFossilMedic

When I was a Director of Operations in Los Angeles I required my managers and supervisors attend a class that I called “The Crumbled Cookie Effect”. The name is derived from a Chaplin who I met at a hospital in Davenport Iowa, right around 1983. Since then, I've placed my own spin and logic into teaching the program. Its an effective program and its very dynamic.

In a nutshell: The first thing I would do with the supervisors and managers, is to place them into a conference type setting. I purchased the largest chocolate chip cookies that I could find. As the classmates eyed up the delicious treats, I insisted that they not eat any of the cookie. There was always an unfavorable response to that request. Awe!

I would begin the class with a little short story that I learned while attending a Steven Covey 7 Habits for Highly Effective People seminar.

The story is about of a man who was riding an a bus and was greatly disturbed at a young boy who was running up and down the aisle of the bus screaming and laughing at the top of his lungs, while the young boy’s Dad just sat idly by. The man could not believe that someone would be so rude and inconsiderate, of the other people around him. He then began to notice other unflattering things about the man. His hair was unkempt so he was probably homeless, and his eyes were bloodshot, so he had to be an alcoholic, the man thought. Finally not able to take anymore of the child's behavior, this man went and approached the dad, and demanded that he get control of his young son or else.

The dad seeming to be shaken from a trance apologized to the man and told him that the boy’s mom, his wife, had just died at the hospital after struggling all night, and he was trying to think of a way to break the news to the boy. Wow! How profoundly different the mindset this man had on the man with the unruly child!

Now I had my students pick-up the large, chocolate chip cookie, and asked them to stare at it for a while. I ask them to consider the cookie as a bundle of problems our employees may be having. Personal problems. EMS Employee personal problems. There are a lot!

I asked the group to think about the absolute worst problem that one of their employees could be experiencing in their life at this moment in time. The group debated it back and forth for almost an hour. Then they started to offer suggestions. One man said that he had an employee who's wife was having impending child delivery issues. Another cited that one of her EMT's just lost his mother and sister in a car accident. And well, the list went on.

I started taking all of their recommendations one at a time, and wrote them up on a dry erase board. What I called it “The Parking Lot” list. (Thanks to a dear friend for that pearl).

We filled up the White Board quite nicely with information. I then selected all of the problems that the employees could possibly be experiencing.

Here are some:
1.) Money! Always comes down to money. I had each person break off a large piece of the cookie.
2.) Spousal communication and interpersonal issues.
3.) Parent Child rearing problems.
4.) Health issues is a huge problem! Another big piece of cookie.

We would usually pick 15 to 20 topics!

We continued breaking off pieces of the cookie. Piece by piece, the cookie would be whittled down, until finally it was transformed into a very small piece.

I told them to take a really good look at that little piece of cookie.

And then this is what I told them:

“This little piece of cookie my friends, is what your employees are coming to work with. This is all they have left to do the job they need to do".

"These are the same EMT's and Paramedics that must muster up enough energy and courage to hopefully save lives"!

"For crying out loud, somebody's driving a huge bullet down the streets of the city"!

So Ambulance and EMS Managers, Supervisors and SSC's, please personally get to know and understand your "fellow" employees. Do a “Cookie Triage” if you will. Scale them on a 1-4 scale. As you well know, this makes it easier to figure where their at.

Supervisors, make a note each time you have a a face to face chat with an employee. If you do that every week, you'll recognize instinctively when and if one of your folks is having a problem.

Offer them whatever tools you have in your arsenal in order to get them back down to a 1. Help them refill or rebuild their cookie.

It only takes a supervisor asking a very subtle and simple question, in order to provoke a call for help. Like, is everything going OK?

There is lot more to The Crumbled Cookie Effect, and not everything can be mentioned in this blog spot.

Watch that cookie!

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See you on the flip-side of this business!

Jim...