
Each week for the last six years (with a few lapses at vacation times, etc.!), Paul has found or written something he hoped would help clients and friends get some valuable insight into work and living. Stories, quotes from famous and not so famous people, humor, poetry—something to provoke thinking and action around:
- being genuinely oneself,
- being generous with other people and oneself, and
- being generative of good, beneficial work
- and other useful and/or provocative subjects
The best one or two of the previous month are featured here. Come and visit often—you might find something you can use.
This month's quote:
One of the most alarming, cautionary tales for leaders I’ve ever read comes
from the book “Longitude,” by Dava Sobel. Sobel provides her readers with
a thorough history of the extreme difficulty sailors experienced in trying
to navigate correctly before the invention of a clock, in 1725, that would
keep accurate time at sea (necessary to calculate precise longitude).
The story I remember so well tells of Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell, the
commander of a fleet of four British war ships, who had himself
miscalculated the position of his fleet and on a dark October night in 1707
and was bearing down, unknowingly, upon the rocks of the Scilly Isles. One
enlisted sailor—not an officer—was convinced either by his own navigational
calculations (something that sailors were forbidden to do) or by the smell
of burning kelp (which he, as a Scilly native, knew well to be a sign that
the islands were very close indeed—accounts vary as to why this lowly
sailor finally became desperate enough to approach the officers and declare
his informed fears). Sir Clowdisley and the other gentlemen were enraged
that a lowly sailor would dare to make such an impertinent, insubordinate
declaration. The man was immediately hung from the yardarm for his crime;
then within half an hour Clowdisley’s ship and the rest of the fleet
crashed upon the rocks. Among the 1500 sailors there were only 13
survivors.
Finding the right balance between top-down, directive leadership and
bottom-up, participative leadership has always been a challenging dilemma.
I encountered it twice on Saturday morning as I conducted a choir rehearsal
for our Easter program. First there was the comment by an alto that the
Easter carol we were rehearsing seemed too slow—literally, she said: “it
feels like this piece is dragging.” I could have resisted this
“insubordinate declaration,” but it was immediately apparent that she was
right. So much so that a new tempo and how to conduct it came immediately
to mind. We tried it on the spot, and the piece took on a whole new
feeling—vastly improved by her suggestion.
The second item was less of a challenge than an opportunity. We were
rehearsing a piece that one of the choir members had, when he himself was
choir director, selected and conducted for an Easter program about 6 years
ago. Now he was singing tenor, without much prior rehearsal, and realized
that he didn’t know the part—and the performance was to be the next day.
“Paul, I’m having trouble with singing this—I’ve conducted it, but never
sung it—so I’m wondering if you’d like to trade places with me for this
number…” I looked fleetingly at my wife’s face, and my daughter’s, got a
mixed message, and made up my mind. “Good idea, let’s try it.” So Thom
took the podium and I sang the tenor part. It was the right decision.
So, once in a while I get it right. Or, as George Burns once said, “You
win a few, you lose a lot.”
It’s a walk on a tightrope: to be in charge and to not be in charge at the
same time. And it’s very lively up there.
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A friend shared a story with me last week that I’d like to share with you.
After months of frustration whenever he had to work with the company’s
Chief Information Officer, my friend went to the CEO, his own boss’s boss,
and said:
“The CIO is a bozo; you’ve got to get rid of him.”
The CEO replied: “You want to talk about bozos, let me tell you about ALL
the bozos who work at the top of this company.” He then described very
succinctly and incisively the weaknesses AND the strengths of his entire
10-person top team, including the CIO and also himself. Then he said:
“I’d love it if I could replace all of us with perfect people, but there
don’t seem to be enough perfect people around. So I’m making sure that
none of us has responsibilities that, if we screwed up, it would wreck the
company. My job is to pull the strengths out of these people and tolerate
their weaknesses. And I know that, despite our imperfections, we can
succeed. Magellan sailed around the world with boats that were pretty
badly battered up, but they made it. We can, too.”
And they did.
I love the line about “not enough perfect people around.” It’s a strong
reminder that we’d better get used to dealing with flawed people, and that
we should be grateful that others are also willing to deal with us and our
imperfections just as we are. Perhaps there’s a standard, unspoken
agreement among people who work together successfully: that they’ll do
this—that they’ll not expect perfection from each other, even while their
standards and expectations may be very high.
Not expecting perfection doesn’t mean getting sloppy and too easy-going—and
sometimes people just can’t meet the minimum of what’s necessary and have
to go—but it does mean recognizing and being okay with the humanity of our
associates, and of ourselves. If we insist on always being right, on
seeing things only from our own, righteous, “I am perfect” point of view,
we break that implicit agreement and damage relationships that we
desperately need in order to be productive--never mind to be happy. As I
look at the most productive and happiest of my clients, they seem to have
figured this one out.
Paul
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