"You Completed the Task with a Broken Heart"

 I had a supervisor many years ago who was a solid guy.  Larry was a great husband and father, a competent mechanic and a lot of fun to be around.  As a supervisor, he often got caught between the upper management (not as nice as he was) and the guys in the shop.

We had a plywood sheet saw in the carpentry workshop and the carpenter was complaining that it was cutting out of square.  The managers put that high on the priority list and Larry tapped me to fix it - on a Friday afternoon.

The saw was a foreign made machine and there were no obvious adjustments anywhere - so I did what all Clifton Strength Analytical folks do and went back to Larry to see if he had a manual for the machine.  In that rare and out of character moment, Larry snapped back at me and told me to 'just go and fix the damn thing.'

I trudged back to the carpentry shop and worked on that thing late into the evening.  I disassembled part of the machine, figured out the adjustment scheme and had it cutting square by the end of the evening.

On Saturday afternoon there was a knock at my door.  Larry was standing on the doorstep with a bag of M&M's.  He stopped by to apologize for snapping at me and to thank me for fixing the machine 'with a broken heart.'

Another of my Clifton strengths is Maximizer.  I have been 'burdened' throughout my life with the underlying ethos to make others successful - often when they won't even help themselves.  That is why I asked for the book (wanted to do it correctly and not break anything).  That is why I worked past quitting time.  That is why I completed the task with the desired result.

A person of a different character (and I have seen this throughout my years) would have snapped back at Larry, told him to go F himself and walked off the job - or sabotaged the machine, or delivered a poor result, or just given up on the task.

So, for the Maximizers out there the saying 'No Good Deed Goes Unpunished' is often our cynical way of coping but the reality is that we will continue to be true to our nature and act according to who we are - even when it is not comfortable, nice or profitable.