Chico’s Corner
A janitor was still a janitor. He was also a poet. Good systems hold people accountable for the work they do while staying curious about who else they may be.
Why We Should Resist Reducing People to Their Job Titles
In third grade I was called a problem.
I finished each hour’s batch of intended work in a few minutes, then sat quietly at my desk reading. The teacher explained to my parents that my silent reading made the other kids jealous and squirmy. They rushed their work, so it interfered with learning. She had a solution and had put together a stack of pictures to color with crayons that we all kept in our desk. This way, she had said, it would look like I was still working on the assignment, and kids would not get distracted.
The next day, this was explained to me in class and the pack of pictures to color was handed over.
“Color?” I thought, “like a kindergarten baby?”
No way.
I put my head down and mock-slept the rest of the hour, then threw the packet in the trash on the way out the door to recess. I returned to a red-faced, raging teacher, Mrs. Bridges, and was sent to the principal’s office.
The principal was a kind man who asked me why I did such a thing. I had thrown away a packet my teacher had spent time assembling just for me. I tried my best to explain, despite my rapid heartbeat and trembling voice.
“Well,” he said, “I hear you, but it is also clear you cannot be the cause of other children not learning the lesson. Mrs. Bridges will not abide that. Do you have a solution?”
“Yes!” I exclaimed as the solution immediately appeared. “I want to start a school newspaper. I can interview teachers to get to know them as people, and students can submit their own stories. I can do all of the work to put it together and we can sell copies for ten cents each.”
To my complete shock, he agreed it was a good idea. I was released from class to work in a side room on the newspaper when completing assignments early. I called it The Web.
Kids got excited. Stories were submitted, and teachers we loved were chosen as interviewees. Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Bridges was not a kid-favorite and was never interviewed.
The Web had stories of monsters, heroes, adventures in theme parks and little-known facts about teachers, such as their favorite ice cream flavors.
Then, one day, the school janitor tapped me on the elbow as I was scurrying past in the otherwise empty hallway during class hours, working on "my" newspaper.
“I found this,” he said, holding up a older copy which appeared to have been rescued from the trash.
I'd never heard him speak before. Usually, teachers pressed the intercom button and shouted, “Send Chico right away. Yes, another puker,” and he would arrive, lightly sprinkle sawdust, and clean up the mess. His white-haired bent head showed concentration on the sweeping, while his grizzled face remained solemn, without expression.
I turned and saw his sparkling eyes meet mine.
“Is poetry allowed in your newspaper?”
“Poetry? I guess so. Sure.”
“Okay, come see.” He took off toward a door to the mechanical room, the boiler room. He had a spiral notebook on a small table next to the student-sized chair in the dark, damp room. He flipped through.
“Take a look.”
I began to read in the dim light. His handwriting was beautifully scripted. Penciled lines with some erasures and rewritten phrases gave way to a glimmer, then a light of pure wonder in my brain as the page seemed to glow.
I was transfixed.
“Can any of these work? This is what I do on my breaks here, I write poetry,” he said gently.
“Yes. Yes. All of them are beautiful. Wonderful. I’m giving you the corner of the front page for poems, calling it Chico’s Corner,” I replied. The concept had arrived whole and intact, as if it always should have been there.
And suddenly he became popular with us kids. Poems of autumn leaves came in the fall, and those of snowflakes and old-timey holidays took front page in the winter.
We previously didn’t even see him, really. He was like background noise to our brains. His poetry transformed that.
Kids asked me to interview him as the next school celebrity, the first non-teacher interviewee.
Chico’s Corner was a complete hit.
Why We Sometimes Miss Hidden Capabilities
Nobody knew Chico was a poet because nobody had ever asked.
The school knew his role. None of us knew the man.
This is where organizations so often fail by confusing the job title with the person.
We know who cleans the hallway, who answers the phone, and who processes the purchase orders.
We know who teaches third grade.
Somehow, though, we rarely know who writes poetry in the boiler room.
Just because people have hidden capabilities, though, does not mean people should be excused from the work they are hired to do. Quite the opposite.
A role is real. It has duties, standards, expectations, and measures. But a role is not a complete description of a human being.
Betty and Her Potluck Lunches
Yesterday, I saw a short video of a woman complaining that departmental performance metrics in her workplace would be automated. Results versus targets would flow up on a per-employee, per-department, and per-division basis. She said that earlier, a manager could overcome weak results with commentary to ensure people’s promotional track and bonuses were unimpeded by bad metrics in the tracking system.
“Boo-hoo, Betty,” I commented in my head. “Your hours spent coordinating potluck lunches no longer count as core performance. Good. Finally.”
Because, really, if lunches were important to core work, the company would have found a suitable resource and funded their support.
I did that in an organization I managed. The unit had a history of potlucks, requiring everyone to pony up their own ingredients, groceries, and time to cook up a dish to pass. A staff member was known for muscling everyone into contributing, and folks hated it.
“How do I know they didn’t have their pet cat crawling on the counter or wiping its butt on the tortillas before she made the sandwich wraps?” one person asked.
Fair point.
There were also allergy risks, food safety risks, and the basic indignity of expecting employees to subsidize workplace culture from their own kitchens and grocery budgets.
I announced that potlucks could continue, but company time could not be spent planning them, only breaks. That sent the subtle cue to their version of Betty that it needed to send.
Then I created something cleaner.
I funded a divisional lunch-and-learn with visiting experts, lunch provided by the organization, attendance optional. People could eat, learn something useful, ask questions, and return to work without having baked a casserole the night before while a cat climbed across the counter.
It was an immediate hit.
The potlucks waned and then fizzled out completely.
Why Soft Metrics Really Shouldn't Count Toward Performance
Too often, “soft contributions” are not contributions at all, but someone’s personal agenda to spend time on things which don’t move the organization forward. Or worse, they become a fog bank where poor performance hides.
In my orgs, nobody gets a positive performance evaluation for setting up potlucks that no one wants to attend anyway.
Recognizing this corraling of people into a forced performance is not what I mean when I say we should recognize someone’s untapped potential.
Where Untapped Potential Really Can Count as Contribution
A different thing happened with a buyer on one of the teams in my division.
Her face became flushed any time she tried to negotiate with a supplier. She caved almost immediately. Any negotiation strategy was sidelined in her hands. She was not well-suited to that part of procurement work.
But she was a whiz at SQL queries.
Whenever something was too niche or was needed more quickly than the analytics team could produce, she was there with an answer. She also found things in the data. “I was running a query just for fun and found this surprising thing…” she would begin, and then unleash a huge strategy or opportunity.
I told her that her normal workday did not need to include analytics, but when we had overflow needs, I had authorized her manager to give her overtime, even though she was salaried, because it was outside her normal duties.
Later, I explained to her that her skills were better off in analytics.
“Ick,” she said. “But I like Procurement.”
“I’m assigning you there anyway, just for the next quarter, because they need help.”
A couple of weeks in, she came into my office.
“Oh my God, I love, love, love it in analytics. You have no idea how much. Oh, and when I told my teenage son I was learning Python, he about fell over. He said that was so cool. He’s a gamer, you know. I’ve never been cool to my teenager until now.”
She thrived. Even three years in, when I ran into her, she was still loving it.
That is the distinction. The goal is not to invent unrelated activities and then demand credit for them because they feel warm or social or vaguely good for morale. The goal is to see what people can actually do.
A customer service representative should still answer customer service calls. A procurement buyer should still negotiate with suppliers. A janitor should still clean the hallway.
And.
A customer service representative may also be brilliant at SQL. A procurement buyer may be a future analyst.
A janitor may be a poet.
It's Not Either/Or, It's Both
The mistake is thinking there are only two choices:
- measure performance accurately,
- or recognize hidden capability.
No. It's not either/or.
We can do both.
In fact, we must do both.
Organizations fail in two directions.
1. They excuse poor performance because someone is “special” in that they contribute in non-value-added or unmeasured ways.
2. They reduce people to their current role and miss hidden capability.
Both are recognition failures. The first corrupts accountability, while the second wastes human possibility.
A role is real, with core duties, standards, expectations, and measures. People should be held accountable for the work they agreed to do, purely and without varnish or commentary to fill the void or make up for poor performance.
Yet we also know that a role is not a complete description of a human being, it is just a current assignment, not a soul inventory.
The school janitor was still our janitor after Chico’s Corner began. The newspaper did not exempt him from cleaning hallways, answering the intercom, or arriving with sawdust when some poor child lost breakfast on the floor.
It simply revealed that being a janitor was not his whole story. He had beautiful poetry in a notebook beside a student-sized chair in the boiler room.
No system had asked what else he was capable of doing. No form had captured it, and nothing else in his job title had hinted at Chico's being a poet in his spare time.
Only the channel was missing.
A child made a newspaper because she refused to color.
A janitor found it in the trash.
And for a little while, in a small school, Chico had a corner.
That is sometimes all recognition requires. Not a grand program, a new title or a committee's approval, just enough room for the person's native or additional abilities to appear.
Hold people accountable for the work they do, yes. Sure. Do that. And still...
Stay curious about the person they are. There's always more than meets the eye.
— Madonna Demir, founder of Convivial Systems Theory and author of Systems & Soul
Madonna Demir
