Sweet Home Alabama
In all its irony, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill finally provided some normalcy. I arrived with hesitant enthusiasm, but soon lost my hesitancy and enthusiastically extended my orders multiple times to continue working on the response. I spent six months in the glorious Floribama (Florida + Alabama) region working on the documentation team and was something in my work days I couldn’t identify at the time. Respect? Compassion? What was that nice feeling I had when I arrived to the office that continued throughout the day?
My project team and its leadership served as a lesson in what motivated employees. The nice feeling developed from mutual trust, autonomy, and a got-your-back mindset. All were incredibly intrinsically motivating. (The extrinsic motivation of making a little extra cash in per diem didn’t hurt my motivation, but it was not the driver). Also motivating was the threat of having to return to Station Montauk, a harassment-full, manual labor-intensive, ridiculous work environment, which with each passing month was closer to being a frigid Montauk winter.
¨How to Motivate Your Employees: Threaten that the Alternative is Chipping Ice off Docks in 10 Degree Weather with 25 knot Winds.¨ Threat as motivation might not be worthy of a Harvard Business Review article, but the fear was there and it made me loyal and productive.
It was August 2010, after 87 days for a total of four million barrels of oil spilled, the chaos of the oil spill happening in real time was over. The leak was finally patched and response and resource needs were shifting. The group of 50 of us, who had flown in the day before, traveled three hours to the city of Mobile to attend the morning meeting at the Mobile Incident Command Post. We were briefly welcomed and then told we were no longer needed and would be flown back to our home units the next day.
Some of the 50 were delighted with the news, I felt utter dread. Myself and a fellow avoider of a small boat station, looked at each other in disbelief, surely there had to be something we could do here so that we wouldn’t have to return to our home units. We brainstormed and approached our would be supervisor, a reserve warrant officer, to ask if he could think of any reason he would need us over the next few weeks. The thoughtful guy, with a slight Louisiana accent, spoke to us with a level of respect we had not experienced since leaving home for bootcamp nearly a year earlier. He left to make a phone call in his office and came back with a smile saying yes, we could stay. My shipmate and I were both approved to help him on documentation within the Planning Department. He would now be supervising demobilization (closing of sites etc) and his team was one that actually needed more help than before.
Documentation was right up my ally since I was an avid reader, organizer, and appreciative of a little drama. I worked in an air conditioned office and flipped through papers that came in daily from the response sites and then sorted them by their topical category. Every word on any paper produced from a site had to be archived for the lawsuit against BP.
I started my mornings sipping coffee and reading mayoral complaints and local political gossip. The juiciest correspondence was usually written on sticky notes and the backs of menus, things probably passed around in meetings or stuck on documents that the author intended to keep private. It was early September and because there were elections in November - political rivalries were heating up as blame for economic hardships caused by the oil spill was thrown around. Officials tried to either hide or highlight related corruption, depending on whether or not they were benefiting from it. Plenty of ¨that idiot¨ and ¨cant trust XYZ¨ scratched on documents kept me reading to figure out who was who in these scandals.
Some days, I perused financial claims by people who said they lost their fishing business due to the oil spill, claims that had big red scribbles in the margines written by investigators documenting that the claimant lived 100 miles inland and did not have a boat to their name.
Culturally, I got a taste of Southern cuisine by skimming the jotted down lunch orders before I had to sort them into the ¨unrelated¨ box.
Overall, I read a lot of emails that people probably should not have written, let alone printed. I read, I sorted, and I drank the free diet cokes from the break room. At the end of the day, we reported to the supervisor what we finished and what was left for the next day. It was a simple and glorious existence.
As our work continued, orders began to expire and some on my team were called back to their home units. It started to feel like Survivor, where the day after someone left we would sadly reminisce about our shipmate who was no longer with us, but also be relieved were were still there. My faithful supervisor would usually write a request for his teammates to stay, citing that there was more work to do, but they were not always accepted by the home unit.
There certainly was more work to do. As sites and locations continued to close, we had to implement a way for each of the sites to get the documents they were about to throw away to us. This meant some friendly liaisoning with contractors and lawyers offices. I was happy to integrate a little public interaction into my routine of reading oil spill documents like they were People magazine Deepwater Horizon edition.
One site I had to visit was a lawyer´s office in downtown Mobile. It was close to my hotel, so I walked over before going to work. I wore my heavy dark blue baggy uniform and 15 pound black steel toe boots that soaked up the suns heat. I was content, but tired and a little weighed down. The goal of the visit was to provide the office with guidance on procedures and pick up their related documents. A young male lawyer greeted me way too eagerly for my morning mood and would not stop staring at me and making comments about women in uniform. I rolled my eyes and held my breath up the elevator, thankful that when the doors opened at the top there was a female colleague of his waiting. She cooled his jets slighted, we chatted, and then she waved him away to retrieve the documents for me.
The dude in his frenzy brought two boxes and insisted he carry them for me down the elevator. At the ground floor, I took the boxes, nodded a slight thanks (in my innocent and tired - I don't know how to handle this so I am just going to be polite- manner) and walked back to the hotel to put them in my car and head to the office.
Business went as usual, I gave the team the documents to sort and worked on my own box. Around 4pm, my supervisor called me into his office.
´Caroline,´ he said, calling me by first first name, which was a respectful treat I had not yet taken for granted, ´That lawyers office, where are those boxes?´´
¨Sorted and done! We shipped them off on a pallet an hour ago,¨ I said.
¨Mmhm, ok. I got a call from the lawyer you visited today. He accidentally gave you the wrong box. He wanted to know if he could have it back.¨
¨Uh...,¨ I started.
¨Not a lot we can do about it,¨ he interrupted, ¨I´ll give him the number to the archives and he can have at it. See you tomorrow.¨
Thanks to some simple, solid leadership that knew how to define what was our problem and what was someone else’s, I did not have to make a multi-hour trip to the archives in Louisiana to rummage through papers my team had already rummaged through. I also did not have meet again with the annoying lawyer. Even better, that annoying lawyer got a 1-800 number to a governmental document storage center instead of my number.
You cańt always get what you want, but you get what you need...
The days, weeks, and months passed in Mobile, Alabama. I walked dogs at the local shelter in my free time, I had a membership to a fitness center with an abundance of young southerners and their popped polo collars, and I witnessed acts of sheer dedication to college football - with one woman reversing her car out of a toll road booth entrance and nearly hitting me so that she could retrieve the Alabama flags that had fallen out of her car window.
Six months on orders was a nice retreat and eventually my unit requested me back. My optimistic supervisor sent his usual letter to counter and request my extension, but it was denied. As he told me the news that it was time for me to return, he pointed out that, besides the Admiral, I was probably the last active duty person still on orders, so if it was Survivor, I was indeed a winner.
Returning to Montauk in February though...I was not so sure that was winning.
My project team and its leadership served as a lesson in what motivated employees. The nice feeling developed from mutual trust, autonomy, and a got-your-back mindset. All were incredibly intrinsically motivating. (The extrinsic motivation of making a little extra cash in per diem didn’t hurt my motivation, but it was not the driver). Also motivating was the threat of having to return to Station Montauk, a harassment-full, manual labor-intensive, ridiculous work environment, which with each passing month was closer to being a frigid Montauk winter.
¨How to Motivate Your Employees: Threaten that the Alternative is Chipping Ice off Docks in 10 Degree Weather with 25 knot Winds.¨ Threat as motivation might not be worthy of a Harvard Business Review article, but the fear was there and it made me loyal and productive.
It was August 2010, after 87 days for a total of four million barrels of oil spilled, the chaos of the oil spill happening in real time was over. The leak was finally patched and response and resource needs were shifting. The group of 50 of us, who had flown in the day before, traveled three hours to the city of Mobile to attend the morning meeting at the Mobile Incident Command Post. We were briefly welcomed and then told we were no longer needed and would be flown back to our home units the next day.
Some of the 50 were delighted with the news, I felt utter dread. Myself and a fellow avoider of a small boat station, looked at each other in disbelief, surely there had to be something we could do here so that we wouldn’t have to return to our home units. We brainstormed and approached our would be supervisor, a reserve warrant officer, to ask if he could think of any reason he would need us over the next few weeks. The thoughtful guy, with a slight Louisiana accent, spoke to us with a level of respect we had not experienced since leaving home for bootcamp nearly a year earlier. He left to make a phone call in his office and came back with a smile saying yes, we could stay. My shipmate and I were both approved to help him on documentation within the Planning Department. He would now be supervising demobilization (closing of sites etc) and his team was one that actually needed more help than before.
Documentation was right up my ally since I was an avid reader, organizer, and appreciative of a little drama. I worked in an air conditioned office and flipped through papers that came in daily from the response sites and then sorted them by their topical category. Every word on any paper produced from a site had to be archived for the lawsuit against BP.
I started my mornings sipping coffee and reading mayoral complaints and local political gossip. The juiciest correspondence was usually written on sticky notes and the backs of menus, things probably passed around in meetings or stuck on documents that the author intended to keep private. It was early September and because there were elections in November - political rivalries were heating up as blame for economic hardships caused by the oil spill was thrown around. Officials tried to either hide or highlight related corruption, depending on whether or not they were benefiting from it. Plenty of ¨that idiot¨ and ¨cant trust XYZ¨ scratched on documents kept me reading to figure out who was who in these scandals.
Some days, I perused financial claims by people who said they lost their fishing business due to the oil spill, claims that had big red scribbles in the margines written by investigators documenting that the claimant lived 100 miles inland and did not have a boat to their name.
Culturally, I got a taste of Southern cuisine by skimming the jotted down lunch orders before I had to sort them into the ¨unrelated¨ box.
Overall, I read a lot of emails that people probably should not have written, let alone printed. I read, I sorted, and I drank the free diet cokes from the break room. At the end of the day, we reported to the supervisor what we finished and what was left for the next day. It was a simple and glorious existence.
As our work continued, orders began to expire and some on my team were called back to their home units. It started to feel like Survivor, where the day after someone left we would sadly reminisce about our shipmate who was no longer with us, but also be relieved were were still there. My faithful supervisor would usually write a request for his teammates to stay, citing that there was more work to do, but they were not always accepted by the home unit.
There certainly was more work to do. As sites and locations continued to close, we had to implement a way for each of the sites to get the documents they were about to throw away to us. This meant some friendly liaisoning with contractors and lawyers offices. I was happy to integrate a little public interaction into my routine of reading oil spill documents like they were People magazine Deepwater Horizon edition.
One site I had to visit was a lawyer´s office in downtown Mobile. It was close to my hotel, so I walked over before going to work. I wore my heavy dark blue baggy uniform and 15 pound black steel toe boots that soaked up the suns heat. I was content, but tired and a little weighed down. The goal of the visit was to provide the office with guidance on procedures and pick up their related documents. A young male lawyer greeted me way too eagerly for my morning mood and would not stop staring at me and making comments about women in uniform. I rolled my eyes and held my breath up the elevator, thankful that when the doors opened at the top there was a female colleague of his waiting. She cooled his jets slighted, we chatted, and then she waved him away to retrieve the documents for me.
The dude in his frenzy brought two boxes and insisted he carry them for me down the elevator. At the ground floor, I took the boxes, nodded a slight thanks (in my innocent and tired - I don't know how to handle this so I am just going to be polite- manner) and walked back to the hotel to put them in my car and head to the office.
Business went as usual, I gave the team the documents to sort and worked on my own box. Around 4pm, my supervisor called me into his office.
´Caroline,´ he said, calling me by first first name, which was a respectful treat I had not yet taken for granted, ´That lawyers office, where are those boxes?´´
¨Sorted and done! We shipped them off on a pallet an hour ago,¨ I said.
¨Mmhm, ok. I got a call from the lawyer you visited today. He accidentally gave you the wrong box. He wanted to know if he could have it back.¨
¨Uh...,¨ I started.
¨Not a lot we can do about it,¨ he interrupted, ¨I´ll give him the number to the archives and he can have at it. See you tomorrow.¨
Thanks to some simple, solid leadership that knew how to define what was our problem and what was someone else’s, I did not have to make a multi-hour trip to the archives in Louisiana to rummage through papers my team had already rummaged through. I also did not have meet again with the annoying lawyer. Even better, that annoying lawyer got a 1-800 number to a governmental document storage center instead of my number.
You cańt always get what you want, but you get what you need...
The days, weeks, and months passed in Mobile, Alabama. I walked dogs at the local shelter in my free time, I had a membership to a fitness center with an abundance of young southerners and their popped polo collars, and I witnessed acts of sheer dedication to college football - with one woman reversing her car out of a toll road booth entrance and nearly hitting me so that she could retrieve the Alabama flags that had fallen out of her car window.
Six months on orders was a nice retreat and eventually my unit requested me back. My optimistic supervisor sent his usual letter to counter and request my extension, but it was denied. As he told me the news that it was time for me to return, he pointed out that, besides the Admiral, I was probably the last active duty person still on orders, so if it was Survivor, I was indeed a winner.
Returning to Montauk in February though...I was not so sure that was winning.
