Spread the Love

The other day I went running at our local community center, Kent Commons. The weather is getting stormy, so I wanted to use the treadmill. Going in the early afternoon means the training room is pretty empty, and I can run as long as I want without inconveniencing anyone.

I walked in to the center and offered to renew my ID card. The system was down. Apparently I’m well enough known there, and displayed enough honesty by admitting my card expired, that they let me in. They asked me to renew next time, which I will.

I ran 4 miles in decent time, training for the Christmas Rush 10K in December. I was pretty rubbery after my run. I still had my MP3 player on. I moved to some open floor to stretch out. Another user moved toward me, and I stepped out of his way. He waved to get my attention, and held up my key to the training room. It had fallen out of my pocket. I thanked him, because it was the right thing to do, but also because I was genuinely touched by how sweetly persistent he was about the whole thing. He was a little embarrassed.

After turning in my key and retrieving my (expired) card, I got about half way to my car when I saw one of the exercise class teachers. She was carrying a large portable stereo, a cup of coffee, and some workout gear. I offered to open the front door for her, and she accepted. I turned around, walked back, and let her in the building.

I’d like to think I would have done that no matter what, just to be a nice guy, but after two people being so gracious to me in less than an hour, there was no way I wasn’t going to help out.

Everything we do, especially in public, affects those around us. So ask yourself: What kind of difference are you making today? Winston Churchill said, “When you’re trying to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.” You’re probably not trying to kill anyone, so why can’t you make a better difference?

Fire Your Experts

I am firmly of the opinion that senior management should not be experts in the departments that they run. They should be expert leaders and experienced managers. They should be fully indoctrinated into the company mission statement and goals. From that point on, their job should be to eliminate any activities unrelated to the mission and goals, to remove roadblocks from their department’s path, to synthesize information into plain English for other senior managers, and to shield their departments from interference from further up the line. They should be casting a critical eye over specialist mumbo-jumbo like brand recognition, social media management, and any other activity to insure that metrics are in place and the activity supports at least one company goal.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not denigrating expertise. There are many fields where technical knowledge is critical to success, or at least to avoiding failure. Engineering, HR, Finance, and Legal are all obvious places where specialized training is critical. What I’m saying is:

We tend to hire people we like. We like them because they are “like” us. It’s human nature, but it leads to monolithic group think. You’re better off promoting from another department, being clear about your needs for the new assignment, and then getting out of the way.

Success in a specialty field is no guarantee of leadership or management capabilities. It’s human nature to fall back on what you know, so these people are going to behave like senior managers they’ve met before. That’s no way to innovate. Better to bring in someone with a proven track record for leadership.

Specialists tend to “go down the rabbit hole.” You see them in meetings, struggling to communicate to people outside their area of specialty, launching into lengthy explanations, and focused on some department goal. Those are the wrong qualities for a senior manager. That person must be able to communicate clearly and tersely, and must be focused on the company’s mission and goals.

You could be incredibly lucky. You could have a specialist who also demonstrates leadership skills and talent. Put that person in charge of some other department, but don’t promote to senior management of his specialty field. If that’s his professional goal, he should move to a specialist company.

Qualifications

When I was hiring, I wrote the list of requirements for the job honestly, and then bumped them up a notch. Prior to that, when I was looking for work, it seemed like the job requirements were written by hopeless dreamers. I mean, come on! What MBA grad with 7-10 years of experience is going to take an entry-level job? I wouldn’t even approach a company that published an opening like that, because it raises questions about their realism, practicality, and ability to communicate honestly.

Of course, they might have just been prospecting to see what the talent pool looked like, but that’s neither here nor there.

Even during the recession, I’ve heard “experts” say that, if you’re 70%-80% qualified for a position, you should go for it. Fire up your networking, talk to the hiring manager, and see what you can do. Just as when I bumped up my requirements a notch to weed out the least likely candidates, they may waive some of the hiring requirements if you’ve got the right chemistry with the hiring manager and her team.

On that note, I wanted to share something that Robert Townsend said in Further Up the Organization. He’s talking about promotions, but the same principles apply to hiring.

I use the rule of 50 percent. Try to find somebody inside the company with a record of success (in any area) and with an appetite for the job. If he looks like 50 percent of what you need, give him the job. In six months he’ll have grown the other 50 percent and everybody will be satisfied…

One of the keys is to pick someone within the company who has a well-deserved reputation as a winner. Not someone who looks to you like a potential winner but doesn’t happen to be fitting in very well where he is.

The organization will rally around an accepted winner, even when he’s temporarily over his head, because in their eyes he deserves the chance.

The last person I hired into Wizards of the Coast was very unpopular. Many people who had nothing to do with the hiring process or working with the new hire believed I hired him because he was a former boss’ favorite bartender. Fortunately, my current boss brought the concerns to me and gave me a chance to address them. I explained that the new guy had excellent chemistry with the team, and he’d been an Air Force loadmaster on C-141 cargo planes when he was still a teenager. From my own military experience, I knew that was an incredible responsibility to shoulder.

That new hire lasted longer at Wizards of the Coast than almost anybody else on the team. He had a proven track record, the right chemistry, and the potential to grow into the technical knowledge and customer service skills we needed.

Recovery

It’s hard not to think about people recovering from mistakes these days. Mickey Rourke is back, thanks to The Wrestler. David Caruso came back with CSI: Miami (although, in truth, he was always working – we just didn’t see everything he did). The November issue of Men’s Health has a cover story about Jason Bateman, who has an adult career thanks to Arrested Development. Consider John Travolta’s career before Quentin Tarantino plucked him out of obscurity for Pulp Fiction. Hey, I can go back further than that – Kurt Russell was a Disney child actor until director John Carpenter cast him as Elvis in a TV movie. That led to them teaming up for The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China. Let’s not forget the 86-year drought of the Boston Red Sox!

Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure that work continues to be a struggle for these people. I’m sure that producers and directors (the actors’ equivalent of hiring managers) have misgivings or second thoughts every time one of these men goes for a part. The thing is, we all make mistakes and we can all learn something from people who’ve recovered.

• Learn. If you need to speak with a professional, do it, but learn from the events in your life. Really dig. Ask people to be honest with you about your mistake.
• Apologize. Don’t say “I’m sorry.” Nobody cares that you feel sorry about your mistake. On the other hand, when you say “I apologize,” you’re taking responsibility and ownership. That helps people take the first step to forgiving you.
• Grow. If some part of your life or your psychology is self-destructive, deal with it and overcome it.
• Endure. Never give up. Keep trying. Stick with it. You will succeed.
• Love. Positive energy is catching. It’s engaging and addictive. You’ve got to find a way to put the baggage of your mistake aside and move forward with joy in your heart.
• Deliver. You’re only going to get so many second chances. Make the most of each one. Bring your A-game.

Pack Leadership: Mistakes

Kai, flat-coat/chow mix, and Rustle, miniature poodle

One of the great things about dogs is that they don’t care about your mistakes. If you live with dogs, you’ve experienced coming home from a rough day to the enthusiastic, unconditional love of your dog. More than that, though, they don’t care if you make a mistake with them. They don’t understand what happened, but they don’t agonize over it either. They let it go and move on to the next moment.

If you struggle to let go of your worries and live in the moment, dogs are great tutors. Something bad just happened? Oh well. Hey! A squirrel!

I make mistakes with my dogs. I bring the wrong energy to a situation. I raise my voice when I should stay calm and even. I tell people that I’ll be perfect in Heaven. In this life, I’m going to be human and that means mistakes. What I’ve learned to do is to let go of my mistakes, and to move forward to doing better with my dogs.

Humans are more complicated, of course. We don’t forgive and forget as quickly as dogs do. As a leader, you have to lay the groundwork for your own apologies and recoveries. You do this by teaching your people to apologize, which is about taking responsibility, rather than being sorry, which is about how they feel about their mistakes. You do this by forgiving your people and moving on. Once you’ve dealt with the mistake and accepted the apology, move on. Be fast. Never bring it up again. Then, when you make a mistake, you’ve created an environment in which you can apologize and get on with work.

The truth is, among humans, sometimes an apology is not enough. Sexual harassment, criminal activity, racism, or any discrimination, require a resignation rather than an apology. As a leader, you need to stay alert to the differences, and you need to be clear when accepting an apology that there is a line that can’t be crossed. You have to set the example here, too. One of the first things you should do in any position is write your resignation letter. Don’t sign it or date it, but have it in your desk. You’re not planning to make a horrible mistake, but if sometimes there’s a catastrophic collision of events and you need to go. Do it quickly and cleanly, remembering that your former co-workers have to keep going after you’re gone.

Then you can…hey! A squirrel!

More Mistakes

A week or so ago, a family member who’s studying for the clergy, mentioned that he was struggling with Job. I was tempted to write a blog post about that particularly book of the Bible, but that’s pretty far outside this blog’s subject area. Instead, I’m going to stick to yesterday’s topic and give you a quote from a book that I’m reading – Robert Townsend’s Further Up the Organization.

Mistakes

Admit your own mistakes openly, maybe even joyfully.

Encourage your associates to do likewise by commiserating with them. Never castigate. Babies learn to walk by falling down. If you beat a baby every time he falls down, he’ll never care much for walking.

My batting average on decisions at Avis was no better than .333. Two out of every three decisions I made were wrong. But my mistakes were discussed openly and most of them corrected with a little help from my friends.

Beware the boss who walks on water and never makes a mistake. Save yourself a lot of grief and seek employment elsewhere.

Words to keep in mind.

Mistakes

I was reading a novel the other day, and it got me thinking about mistakes. In The Ice Limit, some of the characters have a disagreement over hiring a ship captain for an expedition. The captain has an alcohol problem, and wrecked her last assignment because of it. She took responsibility and put herself in rehab. One of the characters argues that someone who made a mistake is 90% likely not to repeat the mistake.

I have no idea whether the authors’ statistics are correct. My thinking focused on mistakes and leadership, and mistakes and recovery.

We all make mistakes. I made one during the First Gulf War. I fell asleep on watch. It doesn’t matter how much danger we were in. I let down my platoon. I don’t remember if I ever admitted it to a supervisor. I do remember that I was ashamed. Since then, I’ve been able to stay awake at will. Between my own morale and fitness, I have the discipline to stay focused and get the job done. I made a mistake, I accepted the responsibility, and I learned and developed so I wouldn’t make it again. I recovered, but it’s the nature of military assignments that my platoon never had a chance to see that, and to regain their trust in me.

That led me to mistakes and leadership. It’s a tricky area. It’s important for leaders to create a culture where workers can admit errors. It’s important for workers to notice their errors, and correct them. There’s an old saw that a good worker brings the boss solutions, not problems. Let’s say that, through a mistake on your part, a consumer product has the wrong price on its package. The wrong thing to do is hide. You could go to your boss and throw yourself on her mercy. The best thing to do is act immediately to correct the problem for the rest of the production run, get the details for at least one fix for the existing packages (e.g., stickers and instructions for retailers or the warehouse), and then go to your boss with an admission and a recommendation. If you have a good boss, she’s going to accept that mistakes happen, and act on your recommendation. If you have a bad boss, she’s going to have a breakdown.

Leaders have to admit their own mistakes. When I was just starting out at Wizards of the Coast, I walked into a post. I was saying something over my shoulder to a co-worker, and when I turned around, BAM. Walked into it hard enough to drive the frame of my glasses into the bridge of my nose and cut my eyebrow. By the time I got to a first aid kit, I’d had to admit the mistake half a dozen times, to explain the blood streaming down my face. The next morning, one of the guys on the team I managed had created a cardboard tombstone with my name on it. He placed it and some lilies by the post. I had an urge to get angry. My team was making fun of me. Then my training, and sense of humor, kicked in. I started laughing. When I did so, it started a culture in which my people could admit mistakes. They were ready to accept that, “There’s no such thing as bad news; there’s only information I can use to plan.”

I still have that cardboard tombstone. It reminds me to think about the work culture that I create as a leader.

My Favorite Director: Richard Lester

Once in a great while, I get a terrible headache. It’s nauseating. The left side of my neck tightens up all the way down behind my shoulder blade. Usually I leave work when it starts, because I know it’ll get so bad that it’s not safe for me to drive. It’s not really a migraine, it’s just a terrifically bad headache. When I get home, I take some OTC painkillers, cover my eyes, and listen to some movies. There are five I choose, every time, and they’re all directed by the same man.

He only has 31 credits as a director, and he’s been working since 1954. That’s not particularly prolific. He’s been a composer, editor, cinematographer, actor, writer, and a producer. You can see a short biography of him here.

In 1964, he directed A Hard Day’s Night, a funny musical showcase for The Beatles. He’d already directed Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, two of The Beatles’ favorite comedians. In 1965, he followed it up with Help!, another Beatles film. In 1966, he directed a cast of brilliant people (Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Michael Crawford, Jack Gilford, and Buster Keaton, to name a few), in the longest running comedy since the Roman Empire, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. His deft touch and relaxed hand with zany comedy led Alexander and Ilya Salkind to choose him for the 1973 The Three Musketeers. Technically, there’s only one film. During post-production, the Salkinds decided it was too long and released it as two films, with the 1974 one called The Four Musketeers. Those are the 5 DVDs I reach for when the headache strikes.

If you watch the earlier films, you can see the same comic touch guiding the musketeers movies. I sure can. Some day I may pick up a copy of Robin and Marian, Richard Lester’s 1976 Robin Hood movie that starred Sean Connery, Audrey Hepburn, Robert Shaw, Richard Harris, Denholm Elliot, and Ian Holm. It’s a splendid film, I just haven’t picked it up yet.

What I like about Richard Lester’s comedy is that it’s not in my face. It’s zany, but at the same time it’s very calm, self-assured, and character-based. Granted, the characters in the Beatles’ movies are personas created to sell Beatles records, but knowing what happened to the band doesn’t detract from them any more than knowing that Oliver Reed and Richard Chamberlain have passed on detracts from the musketeers. Richard Lester invites you to involve yourself in his movies, rather than forcing them on you. When I’m ill, I appreciate the choice to lay back, or to lean in.

So do yourself a favor. Discover the work of Richard Lester. After all, everybody ought to have a maid.

Challenge

I wasn’t going to write anything. I felt uninspired. Ironically, that’s exactly the kind of thing that challenges me. When I don’t want to do something that I should do, I feel challenged to find a way to motivate myself.

Challenge is important. My friend, former co-worker, and fellow Waho…I mean Cavalier, Lara Dalch, wrote a blog post about challenge. That got me thinking, and then writing. Problem solved, right?

The thing is, it’s never solved. Every time I challenge myself, I have to set up another challenge. That’s why I’ve decided to run the Christmas Rush 10K in December. I usually run 5K races, but I ran an 8K in September and that went really well. I know the Christmas Rush course is fairly flat. Now I just need to train.

When things get tough, it’s easy – even natural – to retract, to pull back into our shells, to stick with what’s comfortable. The thing is, experiencing challenges builds self-confidence. Confidence gets you through tough times. It’s a constructive spiral, rather than a destructive one. Whether you succeed or fail at the challenge, learn something from it!

There you go. If brevity is the soul of wit, I hope that sincerity makes up for any dearth of words in a blog post.

Pack Leadership: Following

Kai, flat-coat/chow mix, and Rustle, miniature poodle

When I was in the service, they told us that to be a good leader, you had to be a good follower. I didn’t get it.

My leadership started by the time I was two years old, when the first of my younger sisters was born. From that point on, I was in charge of something or someone. By 1999, I was sick of it. I’d been on the customer service phones for five years (18 months is the average lifespan in the industry). I’d been a leader for decades. I made a decision to hang it up.

I moved over to R&D, where I created role-playing game product for some of the greatest brands in the business, including Dungeons & Dragons, Marvel comics, and Star Wars. In the process, I had to learn how to shut up. I wasn’t in charge anymore. My job was to listen, and to do. It was quite an adjustment. I learned a huge amount, though. I learned to differentiate between workers who brought problems, and workers who brought solutions. I learned to recognize situations I could handle, and those that required a supervisor.

I can’t recommend giving up leadership. It’s hard to come back after you give it up, even if you have the skill and the drive to do so. I can recommend trying to put yourself in your boss’ shoes. Try to figure out what she (or he) needs, and be someone who supplies it.

I strongly recommend against letting your dogs be in charge! Hold that alpha position with calm, assertive energy. What you should do is watch the dynamic of leader/follower among your dogs. I’ve found, for example, that short-circuiting the leader/follower cycle can stop unwanted behavior in its tracks. If I can get Kai to come inside, Rustle is less interested in barking – because he doesn’t have the big dog backing him up. Kai wants to dominate Rustle, so if Rustle is getting rewards, Kai will imitate Rustle’s behavior. By recognizing the dynamic, I can manipulate it to get the behaviors I need.

Turns out those Army instructors were right. To be a better leader, I had to learn about following.