The Caregiver Klatch Genesis Story
My first job was handing my dad ceiling tiles while he walked around on stilts that made him look like a human powered AT-Walker from Star Wars. I went on to a full-blown career in construction and grew to love it. But at 33 when my wife was diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer, I began seeing my career very differently. More and more as I struggled to balance caring for Sarah, the kids, and my career, I started seeing my work with fresh and frustrated eyes. I couldn’t solve the big problem I faced at home. But maybe I could solve them at work. I became passionate about changing the culture of the construction industry.
One way I went about this culture change work was hosting gatherings called “Lean Coffee”. Lean Coffee is a structured, but agenda-less meeting. Participants gather, build an agenda, and begin talking. Conversations are productive because the agenda was democratically generated. We brought together the leaders and the doers in the company to wrestle with big thorny challenges like, “Why are the door frames always late?” To me they felt like a town hall meeting. But after one of these Lean Coffee meetings that I thought had gone particularly well, one of the senior leaders of the company said to me:
“Was that a support group?”
That wasn’t a compliment. Back then at least, the heavily male dominated construction industry did not encourage conversing about feelings. But the big problems we wrestled with in our Lean Coffees triggered big emotions. While the feedback stung in the moment, it also sparked an idea. What if we held a Lean Coffee for Caregivers?! We called it the Caregiver Klatch and it was a hit from day one.
