By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to help you find the silver lining in your clouds. Reading time: 3:25.

What do you do when you have a boring job filling pot holes? Fill ’em with something more than just dirt.

Fill ’em with your sense of humor and with your sense of creativity and make your job something more than just filling. Make it even more fulfilling. That’s what a New York City roads repair supervisor did. He turned pot holes into pot luck.

Sometimes he’d fill the pot holes with lettuce, accessorized with a salt and pepper shaker props that turned the pot hole into a quasi salad bowl and added a touch of levity just before beginning another day on the job.

Then on his own time he would take a photo of his creation just before officially launching his workday and supervising his road crew to fill the pot hole in the traditional manner. With a shovel full of dirt more than a shovel full of mirth.

The pot -hole -filler- turned creative photographer is an example of how leaders make the best of their circumstances and add value to their work and quality to their work environment.

No wonder others like to be around them and work more productively because of them. After all, leaders are quick to find the silver lining in every cloud. No matter how frightened, no matter how frustrated or no matter how forlorn they are.

Frightened? The man squirmed in the dentist chair at the sound of the whirring drill. Suddenly the patient grimaced in pain. He shrieked. The dentist stopped drilling abruptly saying, “At least we know you won’t be needing a root canal there,” the dentist beamed. “Those nerves are very good, very, very good!”

Indeed the dentist struck more than a nerve. The dentist struck a leadership pose with his prose. His words took the sting out of the pain. And made the experience more manageable than moan-able.

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