My Unmasked Trip to the Bank
Americans have been tricked into building a prison of our own design
I went to the bank yesterday. Yeah, I know - seems unremarkable except for the fact that a month ago, to even enter the lobby of the bank required an appointment and a face diaper.
Funny how things change, in January of 2020, if anyone had walked into Wells Fargo with a mask on, everybody in there would have called 911.
But now, the mask requirements have been lifted in our area, and 85% of our county population has been vaccinated. At the bank, there was no sign on the door of the bank noting they preferred customers wear masks and yet every employee, and every other customer but me was wearing a mask.
Life experiences are like a Swiss Army knife. There will always be a life-lesson that today looks like that funny looking little blade in the knife that seems to have no discernible use – that is until a need presents itself that makes its particular utility self-evident.
Well, even simple things can generate that "Eureka!" moment. Once that happens, the function of that tool becomes part of your repertoire and you always remember it.
It occurred to me that often the most secure prisons we ever experience are those we build for ourselves. These are not prisons of iron bars and 8X10 concrete cells, they are the crushing limitations we learn to accept as normal.
My unmasked trip to the bank caused me to think about something I wrote back in 2014 about a business turnaround and how well it fits what many chose to do to themselves (or allow to be done to them) during the "pandemic".
Many years ago, I was charged with the responsibility to affect a turnaround at a business beaten down by competition and ineffective management.
The people in the business had grown so accustomed to losing and the subsequent metaphorical beatings from senior corporate leadership that they forgot how to compete and win – and most devastatingly of all, they had lost hope. There was a vicious downward spiral established and the more the business failed, the tighter the corporate leaders pulled the noose and the more freedom the remote location lost.
The more mistakes that were made, the fewer decisions they were allowed to make and that lead to less and less control they had over their own destiny. The planning, direction and governance of the business came to be centralized at the corporate headquarters. No manager was allowed to do anything without review and approval of someone at the home office. With this, the business became slow to change, risk averse and fearful – all things that increased the speed at which they were falling toward catastrophe.
And it was lost on the entire organization that some of the damage being done was due to the delay in responding to opportunities the time consuming and restrictive decision making process produced. The local business simply could not move fast enough to win market share.
I worked with the site leaders for several months to understand the issues with this process and found that even though they knew what to do and were fully capable of doing it, they had become beaten down and defeated. They were afraid to act. They had become the human equivalent of a dog that has been sadistically whipped on a regular basis – a dog like that will recoil from an outstretched human hand because the first thought the dog has is that the hand is going to strike, not to cuddle and comfort.
People, when subjected to similar situations and consistent negative stimuli will exhibit the same behavior.
The following bullets are the backbone of a meeting that I held with the local leadership teams – all the way down to the line supervisors and the team leads – it was also shared with all of the employees after I was sure that the managers understood.
Here are the basics of what I told them:
We must drive a stake in the ground to start the turnaround, every situation has a tipping point and every change has a starting point
I can unlock and open the cell door but I can’t force anyone to walk through – we need to accept the freedom to change
We have to stop pulling the unlocked cell door closed on ourselves because we have grown comfortable with our imprisonment and we fear what is outside
History can’t be changed – but the future can be
I’m asking for your commitment to help make the needed changes – change is hard and nothing changes without individuals who are committed to the fight
Since that day back in 2010, this business has enjoyed many very successful years under some very difficult conditions (2012 and 2013 were all time records for sales volume and profitability).
For over a decade now, the business has been determining its own future – but it never would have happened if the team had not chosen to walk through that unlocked cell door and walked through the unknown toward opportunity. Over the same past decade, that business has produced leaders who have risen to much bigger positions within the corporation and several have been headhunted out of the business to lead other large operations.
One has to wonder if people in America who reflexively blame racism for opposition to everything (contrary to all historical evidence), people who automatically ascribe nefarious intent to every conservative initiative, people who claim to see “inequality” and “plantations” even though the lot of the less fortunate has demonstrably improved and people who similarly fail to see that it is their policies who are largely to blame for the economic stagnation and societal malaise that are holding people back, are trapping themselves in that same prison cell, pulling the door closed even when it is unlocked.
With every law passed and with every regulation promulgated, a little liberty dies. From that perspective, we are building a prison of our own design…but we can stop the construction if we choose.
Often the shackles, doors and walls of the prison exist only in our minds.
The door is unlocked. Open it.