state. If you met him, you’d like him – he just had a naturally likable personality. When he and I struck up a conversation, I realized there was a lot more to him than just charm. His insight about the people with whom he worked was on target. He was grounded securely in a set of personal values that respected each person as an individual and an equal.
At the heart of his values was his commitment as a born again Christian. He didn’t announce it or flaunt it, he lived it. At a point in our relationship when we talked about faith, Wayne said simply, “I’m a Christian, born again and that’s how I live my life.”
Soon after we met, I began asking Wayne to keep his eyes and ears open for specific issues in the various company offices to which he traveled regularly. I knew that not only would he be able to hear what was on folks’ minds in the company, but he was also trusted by every one of our colleagues.
For three years Wayne served the company, giving all of his efforts to try to right-size a problem product. Further complicating his work was a convoluted profit and loss system that hid inefficiencies and shifted losses so that some products looked to be better performers than they really were at the expense of other products’ performance. I watched Wayne work through these roadblocks. He never lost his self respect, his faith or his compassion. It would have been easy, almost understandable, if he had blamed others for the problems he encountered and the battles he had to fight. He didn’t.
At the end of his tenure, Wayne’s managers decided he wasn’t the person they wanted to continue leading the product. They wanted a different approach. I was directed to relieve Wayne of his command, with the help of the chief operating officer. Wayne was traveling to my office for a meeting and I discussed with the COO how we would break the news of his firing to Wayne. We agreed that we respected him too much to make him travel all the way from Texas to the east coast to be fired and turned back around afterward. We reached him on his cellphone and told him the news. I said, “Wayne, you really don’t need to come here for a day so that we can fire you. Do you want to stay home and be with your family?”
Wayne responded, “Tony, thank you. I’m going to come to you. This is a difficult time and you and (the COO) may need me to help you through it.”
I’d say I was a bit taken aback by his words. We need him to help us through this!? He was the one being fired. But Wayne didn’t approach it that way. He knew we were anguished to have to do this and his concern was for us. The three of us met the next day and discussed the details. At the end of the termination meeting, Wayne asked us, “Are you fellas okay? I know this is hard on you guys and I want you to know I respect both of you. This doesn’t affect our friendship.” I thought I would be consoling him but it turned out Wayne was comforting me.
Being fired didn’t dim Wayne’s inner light. If anything, it shone more brightly. Wayne became a successful senior manager in a company in Texas, blessed to be able to work in a respectful environment that utilized his talents and to be close to his strong and faithful family, for which he gave thanks.
You and I choose how we live our lives. More properly, we make hundreds of small choices each day that add up to the sum of our lives. In baseball an inch either way means a hit or an out. In football an inch can mean first down or punt. Everything we need to help us make the right choices and go those inches in our journeys successfully, we already possess.
Our most important choice is how we are going to use all of the best within us to achieve and sustain success.
Lesson:
“There is a destiny that makes us sisters and brothers. None of us goes his way alone. All that we send into the lives of others comes back into our own.” Alicia Appleman-Jurman, Holocaust survivor and author of Alicia, My Story
Chapter Two
“What I’m saying is . . .”
The journey begins with people.
No matter what the topic of discussion, no matter what is being debated, analyzed, preached or legislated, the starting point is people. As a manager, your first duty is to manage people.
Your highest duty as a manager is to lead people.
This first duty has a number of assigned tasks – to listen, to teach, to understand, to monitor, to correct, to develop, to approve, to build a team. There are several good and profitable reasons why you accept this duty and perform these tasks – it’s the job for which you are paid, it’s your profession in which you take pride, you enjoy getting the job done right, your success and your team’s success help grow the organization. And there is something inside of you that says being the leader of a successful group of people is satisfying and challenging, like being the head of a family.
You have one enormous advantage in leading the people on your team. You are a human being too. Although the blur of business (“Did we get that freight out to JFK yet???”) may obscure this simple fact, you share all the same sets of emotions, needs, fears, and desires as your people. You may not show it at work but you laugh, cry and have doubts in the same natural ways that they do. And your basic needs for self-preservation, respect, recognition, discipline, nourishment, comfort and the rest are the same also.
These facts are so elemental that they probably seem simplistic as you read them.
Are they?
When did you last consider the straightforward humanity you share with everyone with whom you work everyday? When you look at the people on your team, do you see the individuals or do you see what you think of each of them? What do they see looking at you – the manager who knows, listens and cares about each of them or the face of someone who comes to work with the ultimate goal of leaving it behind as quickly as possible?
The one thing that happens every workday is you enter and leave your workplace as an individual person, a human being, no matter what else occurs in the intervening time. The same happens to everyone around you. Is your goal to be as successful a human being as you can be at work every day?
Let’s Talk About That
For over thirty-five years I have been studying people at work, including studying my own behavior. Although my resume shows that I’ve held a number of different positions, Urban Planner, Management Analyst, Corruption Investigator, Deputy Mayor, Human Resources Vice President, and Human Resources Consultant, what all these positions have in common is my observing, listening, analyzing and reflecting on the subject of how and why do people behave at work.
During college, I worked as a maintenance person and administrative assistant for a real estate firm in Brooklyn Heights, NY. My boss was Ken Boss. That was his name, no fooling! He would say with a smile, “I was born to be a boss.”
He was an attorney, a real estate investor, a collector of everything, an artist, a writer, a candidate for public office, a gadfly, a political activist, a landlord, and a surrogate uncle to me. In short, he was an amazing, confusing, dynamic bundle of human energy. Yes, I never knew anyone like him, before or since. He had all the money he would ever need, and then some, but if he saw a toaster on top of a garbage can, he would take it. “If you saw a five-dollar bill on the ground,” he asked me, “would you take it?” Of course. “Well this toaster isn’t broken, the person just doesn’t want it anymore and it’s worth at least five-dollars!”
Oh,
