Crabs and Labs?
I saw this article on the Harvard Business Review Web site today. The author discusses the Discovery Channel show The Deadliest Catch and how it can teach all professionals about leadership.
On the show, a crew goes out on crab-fishing boats to catch your seafood dinners. It's a very high pressure environment, where the crew literally risks their lives for their jobs.
Article author Scott Berinato wrote that The Deadliest Catch can teach all professionals about employee onboarding, competitive cooperation, innovation, morale and strategy and execution.
Reading this article, I saw a lot of similarities with that crab-fishing boat and the laboratory. How many times have you had to use innovative techniques when a piece of equipment was down just so you could get a test result to a patient?
A laboratory can also be a fast-paced, high pressure environment -- and keeping morale high is essential to success. You may not have to fish for 20 hours in freezing water, but you need to help with a patient diagnosis when you may be swamped with many, many tests. Making sure your laboratorians' spirits are up is so important, just like it is for the fishermen on the boat.
One sentence from the article really struck me. Berinato wrote, "When someone could die if you make the wrong decision, you'd better not make many wrong decisions."
I know you know the pressure that comes with having a job like that. You pay meticulous attention to the tests you perform, but the test results could mean life or death for the patient receiving them.
Next time you sit down to have a soft shell crab, remember what you have in common with the people who caught it...and how important your job is!