Tacy Byham
Your First Leadership Job
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Copyright © 2015 by Development Dimensions International. All rights reserved.
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ISBN 978-1-118-91195-2 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-118-91186-0 (ebk);
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Dedication
I dedicate this book to my wonderful family.
Mom and Dad, as a little girl you challenged me to experiment, encouraged me to step up to new experiences, instilled curiosity in me, and showed me the world beyond Western Pennsylvania. You gave me wings to fly to any career that captured my attention – mathematician, computer scientist, arts business manager, singer – and I chose to come home. Dad, I am proud to be walking in your footsteps, and I look forward to building the Bill Byham legacy into the DDI of the next 45 years. And, Mom, I learned a tremendous amount by your side as you continue to speak with your heart and pride to inspire volunteers and community leaders. You both have been absolutely the best leadership models for me, and I am grateful to be a reflection of the two of you.
To my son, Spencer – you have grown into such a magnificent young man. Every day you make me grateful for a sense of humor, storytelling skills, and hugs before bed. You are presently 14 years old (or 3½ in leap years), and who knows where you may find yourself in the future. I can tell you that I can't wait to see you take your first steps into leadership. And I hope you'll turn to this book for advice when you get there.
It's been a decade since my last book, mainly because I couldn't find one I really wanted to write. This is one I really did.
I would like to dedicate it to my mom and in memory of my dad. While perhaps not knowing about it consciously, they were teaching me leadership lessons every day.
When this book is published, I will have just finished my thirty-sixth year at DDI. So, I also want to dedicate it to my two and only bosses – Bill Byham and Bob Rogers. Not only were they guides and mentors, but they also provided me with the freedom to learn, grow, and contribute. I consider myself very lucky, indeed.
Foreword
Leadership makes a difference.
You might not know that now. But you will.
I've been in banking my entire career, primarily with Fifth Third Bancorp, which operates in a dozen states in the Midwest and Southeast. Banking is an interesting business for many reasons, but one of them is this: We don't make anything. Our product is exactly like our competitors'. We borrow it for the most part, and it all looks the same. It's green, rectangular, and has the same relative value on a given day. In order to stand out in a crowded field, the focus needs to be on how we deliver that value – 100 percent through our people.
I believe that leadership happens all around you. It happens in the tone you set and in the many, many conversations you have to accomplish one simple, but complex thing – bring people into the vision of the outcome you need.
But most people don't think about those things until they get their first leadership job. You're good at being an expert, and then you get promoted for your expertise into a completely different job. And so you experiment, because no one ever tells you – except for DDI – the right or wrong way to get the most commitment from the people around you.
Let me rewind the clock a bit. My first big leadership job was what my organization called a “broadening” responsibility – an assignment that addresses a challenge a company is having and that also helps a leader grow and develop. One day I was called in to see my boss's boss, the Vice Chairman, and I found myself being asked to take on a division in which I had no expertise. None. I was being asked to leave my job in human resources to run operations for the much larger holding company. And I would be leading folks who were highly technical, very proficient, and very experienced. I was in my mid-thirties, with three kids under 10 at home. My new reports were, in many cases, 20 years older. It was a challenging division in need of some significant change and facing big new performance goals.
I talked to some people who knew more about the challenges facing the operations division. I was worried, but I took the job. I knew going in that I didn't have a quarter of the knowledge of the people who had been there for years. And, I was going to need all of them to teach me.
That was the moment I knew I needed to rely on leadership.
We did a number of things, all of them focused on gaining people's trust. We began something new, what is now commonly called “one down” or “two downs.” We would regularly gather in large groups (some of the teams had 15 or 20 people), and I would encourage managers to talk about what they had
