As Simple As Peanut Butter and Jelly

Posted on May 06, 2020 by Jonathan Roberts PhD, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.

This past week I had the opportunity to facilitate a leadership seminar with 40 leaders. The training focused on teambuilding and coaching team members to maximize the organizations overall performance. While I covered a number of topics and used different exercises and examples, one in particular stood out.

The above picture (peanut butter and jelly) looks pretty simple and harmless, yet when the leaders had to provide instructions on how to build a sandwich it produced profound thoughts and perspectives from many of the participants. Many of you may be familiar with the robot, peanut butter and Jelly sandwich challenge. It sounds simple enough, after all we’re just making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. For those not familiar, the challenge involved a robot interpreting instruction written by each team on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and that’s when things went awry.

The exercise was conducted four separate times over a four-day period and focused on the participants being a role model, with very similar results……poor execution! Each team was tasked with writing down the instructions for a robot to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Once the instructions were completed they were provided to the robot (yours truly) and the robot then built the sandwich. The end result was a big mess with peanut butter and jelly smeared everywhere and bread mangled beyond recognition!

Here are the lessons learned from the exercise:

1. Never assume everyone understands things the way you understand things. Just because their resume says they can do it, it’s incumbent upon you to confirm it. Reinforce your standards and ensure compliance.

2. Don’t get upset with people when you provide poor instructions. When you assign work to your team, read your own instructions and map them out…..are they easy to follow? Is the message clear? Could a robot complete the task? If not, work on being clearer and more concise.

3. Don’t assume they know better. Maybe someone never trained them properly and they’re functioning on OJT – On the job training. Or maybe they’re afraid to ask questions for the sake of appearing dumb. Unfortunately, when people are in groups there is a reluctance to ask questions or seek clarity for appearing to sound dumb. The reality is the only dumb question is the one never asked.

4. Don’t assume they did it wrong on purpose. There is a term called GIGO – garbage in, garbage out, if the project or process was poorly trained or communicated, then don’t be surprised when the performance mimics the communication.

5. Don’t ridicule the individual after leaving the meeting. Many postmortem discussions focus on the performance of an individual versus focusing on the outcome of the project. In the example of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, one might say, “How dumb is he, he couldn’t even put together a simple “PBnJ” sandwich? This is commonly referred to as Monday morning quarterbacking, of course you have all the answers after the fact and of course the project would have been better if you were in charge…..or would it? Save the griping and contribute to the cohesiveness of the team by remaining positive and presenting solutions to solve the problem.

As we thought about the exercise, it seemed fairly simple and no one imagined making a peanut butter & jelly sandwich would be so difficult. The consensus was this exercise imitates teambuilding on a daily basis and the onus is on the leader to ensure effective, clear, and concise communication is provided. This is a great exercise and your team will benefit from the learning. In addition, the training adds a bit of levity to the day as well. Focus on the process, not necessarily the problem or the person. If the process is fixed and employees understand their contribution to the company’s success, the outcome will take care of itself.