Parking Your Car: Communicating With Wheels

It’s one thing to lead and another to find that people actually follow you. What makes you want to follow some people and not others? I will try to keep these tips practical and useful enough so you can use them as soon as you’ve read them.

What do you do when you arrive at work? You park your car, of course. It’s so much a part of your daily routine, chances are you never even considered it as an answer to the question you just read.

When you drive nails for a living, you can be a professional all by yourself. But EMS is a people business—maybe the most important one in history. As an EMS leader, you communicate with every move you make, including the ones you never even think about. Some of them are as simple as parking your car.

Think about how your organization treats a customer who stops by your office to pay a bill. Chances are you want that experience to be as effortless as possible, so you provide parking space, a receptionist or greeter, a waiting area with seating, and a communications system to connect them with someone who can facilitate that whole process.

But your field providers are customers, too: yours personally. Think for a second. Your organization’s mission is to take care of sick people. Your field providers do that daily, and you don’t. Management guru Tom Peters was right when he said that if your job isn’t taking care of customers, it’s taking care of the people who do—which makes them your internal customers.

Most crews don’t give a thought to walking past your car every day on their way into your headquarters building. To most of them, it probably makes sense that a big shot like you should have a privileged parking spot so you don’t have to walk very far to get to your office. After all, you’ve paid your dues. But maybe that parking space is costing you some opportunities.

What if your car were parked farther away from that door than anyone else’s—maybe even in the street? Would it make life easier for an employee’s spouse with a couple of kids, stopping by to pick up a paycheck or sign some insurance papers? Sure, it would. And whether you realize it or not, seeing your car parked out there with everybody else’s would make a strong statement about the way you view your people. It would do that day after day, without your ever thinking about it.

Maybe you could use the extra exercise, walking between your office and that car. You could be greeting people on the way in and out. And maybe, reminding yourself of something many leaders have trouble remembering. Namely, who works for whom.