View from the Mountain

Taking the Heat

I have to admit to not understanding this world where we are not supposed to offend anyone including those who are offensive.  I am all for compromise and being friendly as long as the other person is not trying to drive over me with a bulldozer.

Perhaps I grew up in a different world where people sometimes said nasty things to you. You learned to ignore the words without giving up the high ground while remaining on guard for a real punch.

I have worked with people all my life and have enjoyed many friendships but I have also been a leader and there are times when you have to be the leader and do some unpopular things even if it means losing a friend.  The same thing is true for being a parent.  I enjoy being friends with my children now that they are grown, but when they were growing up, the necessity of being their parent far outweighed the need to be their friend.

Years ago I ended up working briefly with someone whose view of the world was so far removed from mine that it was nearly impossible to work together.  His idea of leadership was avoiding anything that was controversial. All of his decisions were colored by the worry that he might offend someone.  The result of avoiding anything that stirs emotions or offends anyone is likely mediocrity.

First off, anyone who has spent a long time leading people will tell you that true leadership is not a popularity contest.  Leadership is all about doing what needs to be done and helping your people be the best that they can be while accomplishing their mission.  Sometimes that requires some blunt language. 

True leaders do not assign blame for mistakes, they seek solutions for problems and encourage their teams to turn in results that weaker teams have no hope of achieving, but you do not get those results out of weak teams or teams filled with thin-skinned people.

I have helped teams do things that were nearly impossible, but I have also helped people see that they were wrong for the positions that they had.  It is tough to get someone to admit that they cannot meet the challenges of a job, but I am pleased to have some of those people who did still among my friends.

I will never forget one of the first meetings with one of my favorite bosses at Apple.  I had just come into the reseller channel from Higher Education.  I had spent a month going out and meeting my resellers.  I was appalled at how bad they were.  We had the head of the reseller channel from Cupertino in our Reston office.  I was asked what I thought about my resellers.  Instead of saying the politically correct thing, I said something to the effect that they were the most pathetic group of computer stores that I had ever seen.  Of course I was supposed to say how wonderful they were.  After the meeting my new boss said that I was too honest to be an Apple manager.

I invited him to get in car with me and take a tour of my North Carolina resellers. He was a great manager and within an hour of picking him up at the Charlotte airport, he said that he would never doubt me again.  The first reseller I took him to was selling Apple products from his dentist's office which was a converted savings and loan building with a drive-thru.  His showroom was the filled waiting room for his dental practice and did not have a single current product on display. He had no salespeople. There were only two receptionists. He did stop his work on a patient so he could meet with us.  He proudly showed us his reseller of the month award he had just won from Cupertino.

Eventually Steve Jobs figured out the pathetic state of Apple's resellers and started the Apple Stores which have been tremendously successful for Apple.  There were some great resellers out in the Apple world but they were few and far between in the mid-Atlantic region in the mid-nineties. As to offending people, Steve Jobs offended more people than I can count, but his model of working with people is not one that I would choose. Steve preferred to humiliate people whenever possible.

However, sometimes the truth is not popular and even hurts, but hiding the truth and avoiding what needs to be done usually ends up hurting far more people.  If you go through life with the expectation that everyone is going to be your friend and like you, you will be disappointed. Life is not Facebook.

Sometimes you just have to stand up for what is right and fair even if it offends a few people.  You should never compromise your integrity even in the most difficult times. People will appreciate your efforts to do what is right.

Each role I have accepted has been done to the best of my ability. I have never shirked the responsibility for my actions including mistakes and offending some people.

The friends that I have made along the way have turned out to be ones who appreciate honesty, openness, and fairness.  The folks who have a problem with me usually have a problem with those three traits.

Whatever happened to graciousness?

I will admit to not remembering much from long ago Sunday school lessons, but I do remember that being gracious to strangers was an important part of life.  It was also important in my upbringing.  My mother used to tell me stories about getting stuck on the muddy roads to Yadkin County when she visited from the big city of Mount Airy.  Often she had to knock on the door of a stranger to see if they could pull her car out of a mud hole.

The door on our farmhouse in Tay Creek, New Brunswick, got many knocks during the worst snowstorms. Many late nights someone would wade through the snowdrifts to ask if I would come pull them out of a ditch full of snow.  I never turned anyone down even though I knew it would mean crawling around in sub-zero weather in the snow to get a logging chain hooked to something sturdy before I put one of our 15,000 pound tractors in gear to pull the vehicle out.  I never took a dime for helping these strangers.

I have lived near some crazy people in my life, but I have tried to be gracious even to the most challenging of them.

Graciousness goes farther than just helping strangers, it used to define how winners and losers treated each other.  Today, it seems that many believe than spitefulness is the way to handle any interaction.   If I am winning, let me rub my opponent's face in the dirt for good measure.  Is it any wonder that we have a hard time coming together after an election.

Being a gracious winner or loser is part of the process of coming back together so things can get done.  Taking your ball and going home is unlikely to be a way to help heal wounds that a game or an election caused.  Finding something good in your opponent instead of classifying them as the devil makes life better whether you win or lose.

Even the idea that I have to lose for you to win deserves to be challenged.

If you have forced someone to the point of unilateral surrender, it is unlikely that they will be thrilled to help you.

Graciousness in winning can make losing a lot easier and life more rewarding.

 

The Chance to be Great

We all start out wishing to do great things.  With life's ups and downs, being great can be a formidable challenge.  Whether you are a business hoping to serve your customers a wonderful meal, a professional trying to deliver a fantastic presentation or proposal, or even a student trying to get into a top tier school, you hope that your efforts have been worthwhile and that someone will notice.

You do not have to get far in life before figuring out that mistakes always seem to be noticed far more than efforts toward greatness.  If you are manager, one of the first things you need to learn is not to assign the blame whenever you can but to take the blame sometimes even when the fault is not yours.  One of my golden rules of management is that a mistake is not a mistake the first time around, it is a learning experience.

In essence if your team makes a mistake, you need to have broad enough shoulders to say that I did not prepare them well enough for this challenge.

If you are running a restaurant and a less than satisfactory meal gets delivered, where does the fault lie?  The staff in the kitchen, the waiter/waitress, or the owner/manger?

We try to review a few restaurants each year before updating our Emerald Isle travel guide.  Often we will take the risk of going someplace where we have been disappointed before but we have a hunch that the elements are there for a great meal and a very nice dining experience.  More often than not, we end up disappointed a second time.  We do not put bad reviews of restaurants in our travel guide.  We just do not recommend places where we would not take friends.

Our last visit to this one restaurant started well but ended up reminding us why we quit recommending it a few years ago.  We got to the restaurant at a little after the noon hour on a Monday.   There was only one other couple having lunch. Things do get quiet in the area during winter so that is not an immediate red flag.  There was a waitress and a cook but no manager.  We both ordered subs and twenty minutes later, the waitress brought us our meals.  My order was completely wrong.   While the waitress offered to have the correct one made, we did not feel like waiting another twenty minutes and decided just to split my wife's sub.  This is not a subway.  We ended up paying close to $20 with tip for one sub, one soda, and a cup of water with our plate of rolls.

No other people had come into the restaurant while our order was being prepared. The owner of the restaurant did pull up outside in a car and the waitress went out and talked to her.  We are a small community so I happened to know the owners because in a previous life I was a buyer's agent for the people who bought their home.  The waitress spent most of her time in the kitchen talking to the cook.  While we enjoyed our perfect plate of rolls they were not the meal we wanted.

So whose fault is it that I got the wrong meal?  I blame the owner.  Past experience leads me to doubt the restaurant has the proper procedures for making certain that the right food is ordered and gets back to the customers. The last time we visited the restaurant, I ordered exactly the same menu item also without any modifications and I also got another wrong meal.  It was a different wrong meal but it was still not what I ordered.  The waitress was certainly different and I suspect the cook was also different.

How could it have gone differently? The owner could have walked the twenty-five feet to the restaurant and checked on her customers and what was going on in the kitchen.  A good owner might have stopped at the table to say hello and ask about what had been chosen for a meal and walked back into the kitchen to make certain that was what you were going to get.  It would have taken less than ten minutes. That did not happen and they have lost a customer. We will not go back to the restaurant and we will not recommend them in our travel guide.

So how does this apply in other businesses?  If I am a manger sitting in a corner office,  I need to be involved just enough in the business to know what is happening and to make sure it meets my standards, but I need to do that without micro-managing everything.  It is not an easy balance to achieve.  Sometimes you can best achieve it by carrying the water buckets for your team. 

One of the best examples that I can give you comes from my days as an Apple manager.  Back in the mid-nineties I had a team of over twenty people working with me.   We got frustrated with Apple corporate and their refusal to get our message out so we decided to do events in over twenty cities across the Southeast. Some of the events had three or four hundred people at them and we had to get equipment from our office in Reston, Virginia to cities all over the District of Columbia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania.  Some of it we shipped but it was expensive and challenging to get to the closely scheduled shows.  Because I had a large Toyota Previa van, I took it upon myself to fill it with equipment and drive it to as many shows as possible.  Often I loaded and unloaded the van myself, and even when I did not bring equipment and had to fly in, I helped with the setup the night before.  I also developed one of the technical presentations and delivered it.

You could have asked anyone on the team if I knew what was happening in our business and they would have probably said yes.  I was helping them with what some managers might have considered not their job.  It gave me a way to find out what was going on and to see if something was not getting communicated to me.  It worked well.  Stepping out of your role and helping others do their job has immense benefits.  If the restaurant owner had tried helping the waitress and figured out that wrong orders were coming out of the kitchen, things might have improved.

If you are student and have been encouraged to join the mass of students applying to Harvard or one of the other Ivy schools, how does this apply to you? You have been told you are great by a lot of people around you.  Maybe you have had very few setbacks along the way.  The first piece of news is that this is harder than you think it is and you are your own manager and probably in something of your own ivory tower.

The goal of getting into a top tier school sounds reasonable especially if you have great grades and scores, but the better goal is to get into the school that best fits what you want out of life.  I know that when I was seventeen or eighteen that I could not define that but life has changed a lot in the last fifty years.  The competition is tougher and there are a lot more people so you have to work harder and smarter.  Look at yourself, understand your strengths and weaknesses and be prepared to explain why Harvard or Yale is the place that you want to go.  Also if you get interviews, ask for feedback and impressions. You do not want to talk out of interview which was not good and think that you were great. I have seen it happen many times.  Like the manager who has to get out of the corner office to really understand what is happening, you have to get out of your own bubble to get an honest appraisal of what college might work for you.

Being great boils down to taking almost nothing for granted.  That includes what is supposed to be happening around  you.  Own the situation along with your success or failure in handling it.  Take the needed steps to get better and closer to being great. Never forget that great is a relative thing.  We each can achieve greatness in our own way.

You often hear that surrounding yourself with great people is a way to success.  That only works if they are the right great people and you create an environment for them to help you achieve your goals and theirs.  Sometimes a bunch of great people in a room can end up being like a Boy Scout troop without adult leadership- see Apple in the late eighties and early nineties for plenty of examples.

 

 

The World Is Yours, We Have Your Back

I consider myself very lucky.  My mother was a wise lady. 

She was also anything but a helicopter parent.  My first grade teacher was my mother's first cousin so there was no coming home and complaining about the teacher. 

Teachers had a special status in the fifties and it could best be summed up by saying they were nearly infallible.  That is not to say that all teachers were perfect.  However, part of going to school was surviving the teachers that you got and I learned that early.

Mother who had at a very early age learned to survive in the world seemed to know that the best way to thrive in the world is to get out and learn from it. She was always there to help but that sometimes meant she was going to push you right back out into the mess that you could not solve the first time.

Mother also believed that you had to learn how to fight your own battles.  I remember her telling me more than once that I should never start a fight, but if I ended up in one to make sure I fought to win.

I can remember a little help on my homework in the first and second grade, but a couple of years after that I was balancing the checkbook for mother's beauty shop. Mother was a huge fan of going places, but she never cared much for maps so I became the navigator at a very early age.  We would take off in her old 52 Ford and I would guide us to whatever destination struck her fancy.  I feel fortunate that I grew up with a love of the North Carolina coast because of the many summer vacations we enjoyed here.

I recently read a Washington Post article about helicopter parents moving beyond schools and becoming involved in job interviews and even complaining to bosses about performance reviews and salary increases.

I certainly helped my children with their first résumés but the idea of going to a job interview with them is well beyond what I consider appropriate for parental help. I remember giving my daughter some Hyatt reward points so she could go to her first interviews right out of college without spending a fortune.  I still remember my son who got his first layoff package as he graduated from college refusing to even utilize my contacts to get a job interview.  At least he was not so stubborn that he refused his sister's contacts or her offer of a place to stay.

We have always told our children that home is the place that you are always welcome no matter what.  While we might not be in a position to solve every challenge that they might confront in their adult life, we will pitch in and help them figure out what will work for them.

We already ask advice from them on many things and value their opinions.  They help us and we hope to continue helping them.  I like to think the title of the post says it all, "The World Is Yours, We Have Your Back." Like my mother, we are not going to fight their battles but we will be here to offer advice, support, and whatever they need if a particular turn of events does not go so well.

If you look closely in the post picture, you will see a helicopter.  Neither Glenda nor I will be piloting or riding in one of those.  However, if one of the children's kayaks gets stuck in the river on the way to paradise, I will help them get back to the dock so they can make another try at it.

 

Signs of Power

Subtle signs of power are unneeded when you are out on a big body of water like Bogue Sound. 

You know you have to respect its power and if things get rough, most of us quickly head home and hope for a quieter day to enjoy its beauty.

Signs of power in those entrusted with organizations are a little harder to figure out.  They can exemplify good or bad traits, but explaining the signs is lot more complex than my water example.

Over the last few decades I have had the opportunity to work with good, bad, and terrible managers and a few great leaders.  Some were famous like Steve Jobs and others were just good people doing their jobs to the best of their ability.

Being aware of signs of power can help organizations change for the better or at least you can understand that things are not exactly how they seem at first glance.

My list is not a comprehensive one and more might come to mind and be added over time.

I have to get one thing out of the way early. Steve Jobs was not a great leader. He certainly was a product visionary and Apple is a very rich company because of that but not because of his leadership skills.  There were some ideas that Steve pushed that helped Apple organizationally, but growing leaders or even people to replace himself were not things that Steve did well.  He loved his power and enjoyed using all of it that he could.

The best anecdote that I can share about Steve Jobs happened in 2004.  After years of letting us manage the largest federal show, FOSE, out of our field sales group, Apple corporate decided to take it over.  My favorite story is that Steve Jobs actually picked the folding chairs that were in our small presentation space at the booth.

As director of federal sales for Apple, what kind of chairs we had in the booth mattered little to me, and I would have far preferred Steve had spent those precious minutes trying to understand why Apple products were truly needed in the federal space instead of studying chair brochures.  You can read the full story here.  Perhaps micromanaging product creation makes sense if you have a knack like Steve but picking the chairs in a federal show is something Steve could and should have delegated.

We all know that power has its prerogatives, but wise leaders understand what they can entrust to the people around them. They learn not to micromanage every detail.  Rearranging or picking the chairs on the deck is not a great thing for a leader to do especially if they really need to be guiding the ship.

One thing that Steve Jobs and I did agree on was note pads.  Steve would not allow them in meetings and was known to tell people trying to take notes that they would be better off just paying attention.  Unfortunately he often used much more insulting words to make his point. 

Our team at Apple got to be very leary of notepads.  We had a couple of ex-Adobe managers come through the doors and each of them made a huge deal about how important their notebooks were to them.  Unfortunately what we found was that just because they appeared to be taking notes did not mean that they were paying attention or even remotely considering any action to solve our challenges.

More important than notepads is how meetings are organized and run.  For those who are uninterested in sharing power, meetings are more of a rubber-stamp affair than anything else.  It is often an opportunity for the power hungry to show how much power they have.  Little of real meaning takes place in their meetings.  Meetings become something to hurry through and discussions are often cut short. Real decisions are made behind closed doors. Often the people going to the meetings never hear the real story even if doing their job requires that they know what is happening.  If you get an agenda that rarely changes, start getting suspicious.  The more information gets compartmentalized and the less you understand how everything is working, the more you should worry that someone is consolidating power and you are on the road to becoming a classic example of mushroom management.

Written reports are also a warning flag.  Most successful organizations do not need a report in writing to know what another piece of the organization is doing.  People in successful organizations know what each other are doing and pitch in as needed. Secrecy is rarely part of the way they are run. Meetings are far more effective if each person has five minutes or so to discuss their issues and get feedback from team members, but micro-managers do not like this kind of meeting because they lose control.  A rubber-stamp meeting is never a messy meeting because nothing ever comes up that is controversial.  Little ever even comes up to discuss and attempts to have discussions are often short-circuited. Identifying potential solutions to organizational challenges might get mentioned, but tackling them is always in the future.

Another huge warning flag is a manager who always appears busy but never really accomplishes anything that helps the organization get more effective. Often the manager is so busy doing other people's jobs that making the organization more effective is the last thing on their mind.  The ineffective manager is mostly interested in making himself look good and his actions are organized solely from that persepctive.   You will hear lots about how overwhelmed your manager is, but little about him or her giving up control on some projects that could easily be handled by subordinates.

The final warning sign that I will bring up today, is that leaders who are jealous of their power are hard to please.  They often want things done their way and only their way even if they do not have the skill set to understand the issues.

Getting from being a manager who is jealous of power to a leader who understands that leading is all about sharing power is a difficult transition for some folks.  This article of mine, Finding Your Way To Leadership, provides some additional suggestions.