All credit for this post goes to my friend, Lahat Tzvi. Lahat and I have a regularly scheduled time to talk, once a month. Our conversations are typically scheduled for an hour, they always last longer. He and I had to stop today’s conversation at two and a half hours–not because we were finished, but because we both had to run to other meetings. Our conversations are one of the events I look most forward to, each month. So thank you, Lahat!
Today, our conversation wandered into leadership. We shared different projects we each were working on, discussed management and leadership issues. Eventually, we found ourselves talking about memorable managers/leaders in our own careers. As we spoke, we started seeing commonalities each of us had in our experiences of Memorable Leaders.
As I reflect on my career, I’ve lost track of the number of managers I’ve had. On reflection, I struggle to remember the names of some of them–they were so immemorable. Some I remember only because they were horrible. But then, Mary Lee (2- times), John, Jerry, and Bob (3 times) stood out. And several of them, even though it’s been at least 25 years since I worked for them, I still reach out to for advice.
What set them apart?
There were only a few truly incompetent managers, people who had no business being managers but, unfortunately were and I reported to them for a short time. Largely, most were very competent. They were knowledgeable, they were focused, they did the things managers seem to do. Some were very directive (usually the horrible ones.), “Do these things, then get back to me.” And when I didn’t do those things, they would lash out. Some were not really engaged. As long as I was doing OK, they didn’t bother me. Some tried to be helpful, and sometimes they actually were.
But Mary Lee, John, Jerry, Bob stood out, they were memorable.
They weren’t necessarily the easiest managers to work for. Only, Jerry, would be one I considered as a “buddy.” (And Jerry, later, worked for me.) While I enjoyed working with each, we weren’t “buds,” we didn’t socialize much outside of work. We liked each other, but our relationships were more focused on work.
The things I recognized about these memorable leaders/managers was:
- They tended to know me, better than I knew myself.
- They tended to believe my potential was greater than I realized.
- They had very high expectations of my performance and what I could be capable of.
- They were the toughest managers I worked for.
- They invested in me, not just for the job I did working for them, but for what I had the potential to achieve.
They, for reasons I still to not understand, cared deeply for me and my success.
Mary Lee was my first manager when I became a sales person. I couldn’t have had a better start. She coached me, constantly developed me. She rarely told me what I should do, but engaged me in conversations to help me figure it out. In those first years, I made plenty of mistakes. She never beat me up, she knew I was beating myself up. But we talked about those mistakes, helping me think about what I might have done differently.
Some years later, I was reporting to a different manager. I was really struggling, failing miserably. I was about to quit, thinking it might be better to quit than to be fired. For some reason, even though she had moved on to more senior jobs in a different part of the company, Mary Lee had been tracking me. She reached out and asked me if I wanted to come work in her organization. I was pretty down, “But Mary Lee, I’m such a failure…..” She just said, “I wouldn’t be offering you a job if I didn’t think you could be a star performer, take the job.”
Over a decade later, Mary Lee, was living in a different country, working for a different company. I happened to have lunch with her, I was a VP of Sales. We reflected a little, she said, “Well, that manager was really an asshole. But you were screwing up badly and you could have and should have been doing so much better…..”
I have similar, though not so dramatic stories about John and Jerry. They were really patient with me. I was getting to be pretty good, but I was reaching levels where I could also, and did, screw up very badly. They gave me the opportunity to screw up and helped me learn from it. But more importantly, they helped me learn that regardless how well I was doing, I could always do better, I could stretch myself and my teams, hitting higher goals, doing things we didn’t realize we could achieve.
And Bob just made me think differently about everything. Bob was simultaneously one of the gruffest individuals I knew, at the same time he had the greatest sense of humor. We’d have very tough meetings–less about things I was doing wrong or could improve. But he got me to think differently, to imagine new possibilities. Frequent readers know I use the term, “We become prisoners of our own experiences….” I learned that from Bob. Bob was leading a new division and business for our company. We were late entrants to a very high growth market. Our products were weak, our competitors much stronger and better known. But Bob had the dream of becoming the market leader within 5 years. To do this, we had to break all the previous “rules” in our company. We had to look at the business, our customers, and how we worked differently. He helped me understand our past experiences weren’t very helpful. That we had to rethink things. He helped me, and the team, have the courage to experiment and try new things. In some areas we failed and we would figure things out. In other areas, we believed we could be even better than we were.
I mentioned Bob’s gruffness. Sometimes, I’d walk into his office, he’d close the door, sit down, pause, then say, “Dave, you and your team fucked up! Let’s figure out how we can move forward.” In his directness, he wasn’t assigning blame, just fact. With Bob, we never felt defensive, we just wanted to figure out how to change and grow. Bob continued being a mentor for over 20 years. I had moved into new roles, he retired, but he was always someone who could help me see beyond myself, to think differently, and to grow in ways I had not imagined.
While each of my memorable managers were very different, but they each had the common characteristics, I shared above.
Tell me about your memorable managers.
Afterword: Lahat wrote a terrific perspective on his blog: Unforgettable Managers. Be sure to read this!
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