The bathroom flood

Context

Freshman year, I shared a dorm with three roommates. We had a schedule for cleaning the bathroom. In practice, nobody kept to it.

The problem

Eventually the drain clogged and the bathroom flooded.

The obvious explanation was the drain. Instead of stopping there, I kept asking why.

1. why 1Why did the bathroom flood?The drain was clogged.
2. why 2Why was the drain clogged?Nobody had cleaned it.
3. why 3Why had nobody cleaned it?Even with a schedule, nobody wanted to go first.
4. why 4Why not?Each of us felt that doing more than our share was losing.
5. root causeAccountability and motivation, not plumbingA new schedule on its own wasn’t going to fix it.

What I did

I had three options. I could confront my roommates. I could report it to the RA. Or I could do something about it myself.

I cleaned the bathroom and the common area myself, without being asked. My roommates started helping. After that we fixed the schedule, and this time it held.

I should be honest about part of why I picked that option. I don’t like confrontation, and cleaning it myself was also a way of avoiding a hard conversation. It worked here. It won’t always. Since then I’ve been working on raising problems earlier, sticking to facts, and talking about behavior rather than about people.

What I learned

I used to think leadership meant telling people what to do. Sometimes someone has to go first before a group’s behavior changes.