Laundry is about the details. The kind that you literally have to touch in order to notice.

Some companies try to route everything to “the owner” and — surprise — the owner doesn’t have enough eyes to see every stain, or fingers to feel every finish, or ears to hear every fan motor that’s lost its balance. And it’s fast-paced — blink, and the product is already shipped to the customer and there’s a new batch of linen to turn around in hours.

I was really impacted by Gene Kim and Steve Spear’s work, Wiring the Winning Organization, and the insight that decisions should be made as far away from the top of the org chart as they can consistently yield correct results.

That idea stuck with me because it names something I’ve felt intuitively for years running Wash Cycle Laundry. At our scale — over a million pounds a month, two shifts a day, 363 days a year — there is no way for any one person to catch everything. The stains, the fabric quality, the equipment sounds that mean something is about to go wrong. Those details live on the plant floor, and the people closest to them are the ones best positioned to act.

Making that work is a two-pronged strategy. First, you have to build the capability of people on the plant floor — training, tools, context about why things matter. Second, you have to create the psychological safety for people to make decisions, and occasionally make the wrong ones. If someone on the sort line pulls a questionable item and it turns out to be fine, that’s a much better outcome than letting a stained sheet ship to a luxury hotel because nobody felt empowered to speak up.

We promote 100% of our hourly supervisors from within. That’s not an HR talking point — it’s a direct consequence of this philosophy. The people leading our shifts are the same people who learned the details by touching, seeing, and hearing them every day. They’ve built judgment through repetition, and they’ve earned the trust of their teams because they came up together.

I won’t pretend that we’ve figured it all out yet, but we’re on our way.

Learn more about our team and mission or see how we serve hotels.