Luke Murray explains why his company jokes about "getting Luke'd": when leaders share good ideas without a clear implementation path, frontline staff get confused and distracted. He learned to reassure people they're not in trouble, only pitch ideas to those who can actually act on them, and map out exactly how to execute before speaking.
So there's this phrase in my company called getting Luke'd, and it's when I try to help and I end up making things worse. So we have a service where we, we serve people coffee. We're not a coffee shop, but we, we pour about 50 cups of coffee all at once every day around noon for our clients. And I came down to the front line and folks were pouring coffee and they were doing it. They were giving them a ton of sugar, a ton of cream, and they were doing it with, uh, like those diner coffee pot pours. So like, we have a whole bunch of them, so it's taken forever. So it's pretty quick and easy, at least from my perspective, to notice like, hey guys, maybe we should get one of those large coffee makers and just use it as a dispenser. And maybe we don't give them 100 pounds of sugar. Uh, that's not only not healthy, it's also not, uh, efficient. I say this to whoever's working the frontline that day and I just turn and I'm like, "Have a good day." And I hear later that that was not a helpful suggestion, that it confused the person. They didn't know, are they supposed to do it? Is someone else supposed to do it? Are they supposed to tell their boss? Are they supposed to follow up with me? So again, when you do that, that person suddenly feels like they have a brand new top priority. And so, What I need to do, or what I've learned to do, I actually went down and talked to some of my employees and I said, what should I do differently? I said, well, the first bit of feedback I got is when you show up, the first thing that happens is we get scared. And so you need to say, hi, how's it going guys? No one's in trouble. I'm not mad at anybody. I'm not here to get anybody in trouble. And you're going to need to say that a lot. You're gonna need to give that particular reassurance quite a bit. The goal is not to stop having ideas. The goal is to stop spreading ideas into parts of the company or to people in the company that cannot process and prioritize them. Good ideas have to have a clean path, and without that path, they just become confusion.
