Your boss has enormous power over you, and direct impact on your success. She can credit you for successes and blame you for failures whether such credit or blame is warranted or not. She has control over your reputation both informally and formally. She can gossip about you or praise you to others. If she says good things about you, that is your reputation. Or if she chooses, she can tell stories about you that create another kind of image, such as that you are bumbling, incompetent, arrogant, sexist, slutty, dangerous and unpredictable, or not the brightest bulb in the pack.
She administers your official performance reviews; as a commentator said early in the book, she can be the author of your history and thus she can impact your career long after she is no longer your boss, and even after she leaves the organization.
She can give you meaningful assignments and help develop your skills, or she can constrain your ability to have any impact on the organization. If you create great ideas, she can forward your ideas around the company with your name still attached to them—or she can rob you and take credit for all your contributions.
Most people are painfully aware of this power of position held by any boss. But this is only part of the equation. What about the indirect impact of your boss on your career?
No matter how well you do your own job, your reputation and future are closely tied to your boss’s reputation and future. Your power, prestige, and opportunity flow through her. If your boss is wounded, you are wounded. If your boss looks good, you look good. If your boss is promoted, you are far more likely to be promoted. And if your boss gets fired, you are far more likely to get fired, either at the same time or by the person who replaces your boss.
Like it or not, it is in your self-interest to pay close attention to how your boss is doing, to her reputation and standing with key personnel further up the food chain. These indirect forces can be just as powerful as any direct impact your boss has on your career.
Obviously, one of the best ways to make your boss look good is to do a great job. If you bring in your deliverables on time and in excess of expectations, you are clearly a contributor to your boss’s success, and you are helping make your boss’s area of responsibility a contributor to the enterprise.
What else can you do? Here are a few suggestions:
Learn when to share and when to grab credit.
Don’t gossip about your boss. Just don’t do it!
Give the boss the information that matters.
Do not be the source of surprises.
Bring solutions when you bring problems.
Subordinates also have power over the reputation of their superiors. So use that power to make your boss look good. This is not an act of altruism. Remember, your reputation is directly linked to hers. If you tell other people about the good things that your boss does, then you are indirectly praising your business unit, of which you are a part. The unit wins are your wins.
There are bad bosses out there, certainly. But most bosses are sometimes good at being managers and supervisors and leaders and sometimes not very good at being the boss. The point is, you want to be a glass-half-full communicator. Talk about the good stuff, keep the bad stuff either to yourself or between you and the boss privately.
Think of your department as a family. You might fight bitterly within your family, but to the world, you present a united front. It works the same way in an organization. If someone outside criticizes anyone in your immediate family, you would rise to defend them. Likewise you should defend and promote your boss, even if you have “issues” with her.
How Not to Answer the Phone: Interview with Luke M.
“This all got started when our VP and group leader came back from some seminar about super service or the wow factor or something like that—some fad that was going around at the time like a bad cold. So he decreed that every department was going to have to start answering our phones with live humans. This goes against every idea of efficiency that I understand, but what can I do? I’m just one guy.
“The first thing they did was program the phones to ring on every desk in the department until someone answered it. This was unbelievably stupid and disruptive, and you couldn’t turn it off. So my team leader decided we would hire somebody to answer the phones. This was so last century.
“So we hired this young woman who was a little informal during the interview process. I actually voted against her, but I was overruled by our boss. She was supposed to be our sales assistant, but of course she didn’t know anything about sales. In fact, she didn’t seem to know anything about anything. And she dressed like a tag sale. But I’m stuck with her.
“Then one day I come back from down the hall, and I actually hear her saying into the phone, ‘He’s down the hall in the bathroom. Do you want to hang on? I think he’ll be right back.’ “Can you imagine that? My client has a mental image of me in the restroom. She’s holding, thinking of what I’m holding. It’s a miracle our girl wonder didn’t say, ‘He’s in his other office.’ What an idiot!
“Luckily, they got the word upstairs that this wasn’t helping productivity; they turned the automated phone system back on, and we got rid of her.”
Moral to the story: Everyone is always in a meeting, or on another phone call, or out of town for a conference. No one is late to work, no one is missing, and certainly no one is down the hall in the restroom.
Who gets credit for a win is a touchy issue. In a truly fair world, credit would be shared according to the contribution to the win. But we don’t live in anything close to a truly fair world.
Should you always share credit? When you are the team leader or function head this is a no brainer; crediting your team for their performance reflects immediately and directly back on you. It gets more complicated when you are that team player who is committed to the team, dedicated not to your own work but to the team’s work. Being a successful team member is absolutely valued by modern organizations, but you also need to differentiate yourself. Because teams rarely get promoted as a team, you need to get the word out about your contributions to the team’s success. So, in short, if you’re a team leader, throw credit around liberally. If you’re a team member, try to get some individual credit, if you can do it without being too obvious about it.
Finally, on this topic, if you have a boss who constantly steals your ideas and represents them as her own, you need to create a channel to inform people that the content originated with you, and you also need a new boss. Psychologists have found that at least 4 percent of top corporate executives are, in fact, sociopaths. They have no understanding, regard, or care for the feelings of others. Sometimes, the smart move is to move on.
Perception is reality, and you want the perception of your business unit to be one of cohesion, productivity, intelligence, and contribution. Mud that gets on your boss gets on you. Thus, you certainly don’t want to be the source of any mud thrown at your boss.
Gossip is dangerous in general, and gossip about your boss is radioactive. If it gets back to your boss, he will use his power of position to neutralize you. Disloyalty will be punished much faster and much more vigorously than incompetence. An incompetent sycophant has plenty of job security when compared to a competent malcontent.
If you have real complaints about your boss, keep them to yourself or exercise them in appropriate channels, such as face-to-face with the boss, or in private with an H.R. officer.
Remember, the knife you stick in somebody’s back has your fingerprints all over the handle.
To help your boss look good, help him do his job better by giving him the information he needs for timely and prudent decision-making.
In a knowledge economy, you serve as a filter for information to your boss. Are you a good and effective filter, or do you let toxic waste get through or even worse, occasionally let it stop up the pipeline entirely? Do you provide too much information, needlessly distracting your boss with minutiae? Do you withhold information critical to your boss’s role, leaving him unprepared for risks you see looming on the horizon?
A helpful subordinate filters information appropriately. Doing this effectively makes you a desirable and respected associate. Do it poorly makes you a nightmare to supervise.
Knowing what information your boss needs is an inexact science. One boss may want to know once a year whether or not you are going to meet your annual objectives, while another boss will want progress reports by the hour. One approach is not better or worse than the other; they are just different styles. Your job is to discover and adapt to your boss’s style.
I had the misfortune to have two office managers in a row who were equally poor filters. They were exact opposites of one another. One filtered almost nothing, and the other filtered everything.
At the time, I was running a rapidly growing career-counseling firm. Since I was traveling a lot, in my absence my office manager was supposed to be my eyes and ears in the office. I inherited an office manager who saved up every problem and dumped them on me as soon as I got off the plane. If I was gone too long, she called me with lists of issues. There was no problem too trivial for her to take to the boss. If we were out of paperclips, she wanted to know what size box to buy. If one person said something mean to another person, I had to hear all about it even if the problem had already blown over. I could have done her job itself in about the same amount of time it took for me to help her do her job.
A lot of young people spend way too much time running everything by their boss. They are hesitant to make decisions on their own and need constant feedback. This is actually reflected in their language. Instead of owning a problem or mistake or guaranteeing performance, they say “I’ll try” or “I’ll do my best,” when what the boss wants to hear is “I’ll take care of it,” “I’ll handle it. You can count on me,” or “Don’t think about it for another moment. I’ve got it under control.”
I replaced the first office manager with a woman who assured me that she did not need micromanaging. What I did not realize at the time was that I may have complained a bit too much about the habits of the first office administrator. Subsequently I got no information about what was going on in the office. Whenever I called in and asked how things were going, she always answered, “Great. Everything’s going just fine.”
But sometimes things were not fine, and I had no vision with which to steer the office. I found out that a young career counselor I had hired into his first professional position was treating the support staff in a very mean and negative way. Plus there were accusations of racism, to complicate the matter. Instead of being able to address this problem when it first arose, I was blindsided when some of my best and longest-serving support staff threatened to quit. What could have been solved with a sit-down talk near the beginning of the troubles had festered into a need for a full-scale organizational intervention.
And there were other unpleasant discoveries. In short, I could not manage the business without information because my primary information filter was completely stopped up.
When you are uncertain whether to carry news to your boss, admit it. Especially if you are dealing with a rumor or something tangential to her area of responsibility. It’s okay to go in and say, “I’m not sure if this is important or not, but I just wanted to run this by you. Do you have a moment?” If it’s not important, you’ll find out fast enough. If it is, you’ll be appreciated for bringing it to her attention.
It is your job to discover how much and what kind of information your boss needs and when she needs it. The better you do this, the more you will be appreciated, and the better your boss can be at doing her job. And the better she is at doing her job, the better you look as part of her team.
What a boss expects of a direct report differs as you rise up in the organization. At the bottom, in the types of jobs one has in the first ten years of a career, the boss is looking for performance and for appropriate information flows. But near the executive suite, the boss starts to want something else—she wants not to have surprises.
A supervisor near the front lines might tell a subordinate, “Surprise me” or “I don’t care how you do it, just get it done.” But an executive reporting to a senior executive would never get that advice. In the executive suite, being a source of surprises is almost always a bad thing, even if the surprise is positive. For example, suppose you have more revenue than expected, the response at the top is going to be: You should have had more accurate projections.
Think of the function head or chief executive as the pilot of an airplane, but this pilot sits in a windowless cockpit, surrounded by people providing data flows. The top executive flies the airplane based on the data that she is given by subordinates. When that data is off either way it is much harder for her to fly the plane effectively and safely, to the chosen destination, using the least amount of fuel.
Being a source of bad data, that is, being a source of surprises, is to put the entire flight at risk. So being the source of surprises is a career killer in the executive suite. Having a nonstellar but predictable track record can, in fact, be much better than having a reputation for occasional but unpredictable brilliance.
One thing we all hate to do is to be the bearer of bad news. If you avoid this necessary evil, however, you are robbing your boss of timely access to critical information. Bad news is often more important than good news, because bad news usually requires a response. Delays in taking corrective action may exacerbate the problem that created the bad news in the first place.
So how do you deliver bad news? Here are two tips: First, use language and a tone that projects that you are about to deliver bad news, to allow the listener to emotionally prepare for the unwelcome information. This is quintessentially what speakers are doing when they say, “Are you sitting down?” or even, “I have some bad news and some good news. Which do you want to hear first?” So project that you are about to deliver bad news, and your listener will be better able to deal with what you are about to say. Try lines like this: “Unfortunately, I have some bad news about ______. Do you have a minute to discuss this?”
Use a flat, serious, somber tone. Joking about bad news may make you feel better, but it can backfire. Gloating over the misfortune of others can go horribly wrong in the emotional heat of the moment. If your worst enemy wrecked the company yacht during a tryst with the boss’s spouse, your gleeful reporting of this event could cost you your job. They really do kill messengers.
If you can, offer analysis along with the facts. For example, offer an analysis of the ramifications of the event, not just the event itself. Better yet, provide a list of possible remedial actions along with the disaster report. If you have the authority to put a solution into play, it’s best of all when you can report that you are “already on it.”
Pollyanna was the heroine of an early twentieth-century novel by Eleanor Porter. Pollyanna was the eternal optimist, whose glass was always half full!
Some people are pathologically optimistic, some are blind to the dangers around them, and others simply don’t want to be the bearer of bad news. In any case, a Pollyanna is a dangerous team member. If you are on fire, don’t you want someone to mention it? Do you want to ride in a car with someone who would not point out that you are about to crash? Do you want to follow a leader who never sees risk, someone who cannot realistically evaluate chances for success because for him they are always 100 percent?
As well as individuals, there are whole cultures in which subordinates must never point out any type of error or problem to their superiors, robbing the superiors of the wisdom and insights needed to make good decisions.
A boss who is a Pollyanna is like a gambler who thinks he cannot lose. It might be a great ride, but they always end up broke. You may as well go ahead and seek a promotion or transfer, because you won’t like the way this trip is going to turn out.
Don’t be a Pollyanna. Learn to communicate bad news in the right way so you can be a valuable team member.
The first rule of delivering criticism is to criticize only to change future outcomes. Properly done, criticism is not about blame. Criticism is a form of instruction, to change future behavior. If the person you are going to criticize cannot change, there is no point in criticizing him at all. In that case, the adult thing to do is to just keep your frustrations to yourself.
Some people are hypersensitive to criticism, and what you believe to be a harmless remark can cut them deeply, thus harming morale. Criticism is a powerful tool to be handled with care. Just be sure you are interested in changing the person’s behavior in the future to achieve a better outcome for him—as well as for everybody else. If that condition is not met, it might be best to forego criticizing anyone at all.
Forget about sarcasm and joking around—not a good way to criticize even the closest of compatriots. Use gentle language and plenty of qualifiers. “You might consider.…” “Just a little bit more next time.…” “If you get a chance.…”
Most of us have worked around people who think they are being helpful with critical comments, when really they are being aggressive and domineering. The structure of their language targets the person, rather than the behavior. They tend to say things like, “You know the problem with you is …,” rather than, “When this comes up next time, it might work out better if you’d.…” When criticizing, focus on behaviors and responses to events, and don’t generalize into personalities. This is the business version of the maxim, “God hates the sin but loves the sinner.”
Finally, use the Sandwich Method. Criticism is most palatable when it is sandwiched between praise, using this pattern: POSITIVE, sneak-in-a-negative, POSITIVE. If you are careful, with this technique you can criticize upstairs and sideways, as well as down the org chart. Here are some examples:
“You have a real talent for handling angry people. Next time a client yells at you, though, you might try just talking them down instead of giving a massive discount like this. With your interpersonal skills, I’m going to predict you can calm them down without it costing the company a cent. You might try that next time, just to see if you can.”
“That was a great meeting you just ran. I did notice, though, that you asked the only woman in the room to collect everyone’s lunch orders. You have to be careful about that. You sure wouldn’t want to get a reputation for doing stuff like that. But you really seemed to have everyone’s attention, and I think you had excellent answers during the Q&A.”
“I was really honored that you picked me to go on the client site visit. It would probably have gone better if you’d have had a chance to look at those product specs though. I think I can cover for what you promised, so I don’t think it’s any problem. Boy, do you know how to work a room. You really had them going with that talk about an antigravity field!”
No matter how long you might dress someone down, and no matter how thoroughly you go into every mistake they made, always end on a positive, hopeful note.
Managing Up
Managing up means focusing your people skills on those above you, the real stakeholders in your job. If your bosses are happy with you, that is certainly one version of success. Managing up requires different skills than managing down or laterally. You do not have much power over those above you, which fundamentally changes the dynamic. Some bosses are difficult to manage. In fact, some are difficult, period.
For more on how to manage these crucial relationships, read Michael and Deborah Singer Dobson’s Managing Up: 59 Ways to Build a Career-Advancing Relationship with Your Boss.
Sometimes your boss stands between you and what you need to get done in the organization. The more talented you are, the more likely this will occur on a regular basis. Being able to reach beyond your boss is very much a fast-track career skill, and knowing when not to do it is a crucial career survival skill, because it is so dangerous to go over your boss that often it is better to abandon a goal than to try to get past his blockage of it.
It is generally considered an act of disloyalty to go over your boss’s head to get something done, to appeal a decision, to apply for an internal opening, or to distance yourself from something your boss has done. In most companies, it would be the beginning of the end of the relationship you have with your boss.
Before you go over your boss’s head, make sure you’ve explored avenues to success that do not involve jumping over his position. Then and only then should you attempt to go around your boss. If you need to go over his head, the general rule is: Ask for permission first. If you violate this rule, you may never regain his trust.
As in criticism, couch your query in soft language with lots of qualifiers. Don’t make it seem like a big deal. Here’s an example: “Well, I hear you when you say this is a bad product idea, but would you mind if I run it past engineering to at least see if it’s possible? They’ll probably say the same thing you do, but still, I’d like to check it out if you don’t object.”
Of course, if engineering likes the idea, give at least some of the credit to your boss to make him look good, as in, “Yeah, that’s great! My boss said I should run this by you guys, and I’m sure glad he did. I’ll tell him you like it.” But what do you do if he says no? Then swallow your idea and wait.
If you apply for an internal opening, sometimes, but not always, you can let your boss know after the fact. You always want your boss to know that you are not a lifer in the department, anyway, but make it seem like no big deal.
“I just wanted to let you know that I dropped a resume on an internal opening in San Francisco. I’m so not qualified for it, but you never know. Besides, I had this career development class in B school, and they said to interview once in a while just so you don’t get rusty. Nothing will come of it, probably, but I wanted to let you know in case someone calls you about it.”
Remember, no surprises.
Suppose you decide to violate the rule of not going over your boss’s head without permission. Suppose your boss is a one-man forest of deadwood who sits on your creativity and/or steals your good ideas and sells them as his own. How do you get your message over his head?
First of all, be truly sure you are ready to leave the organization before doing this. You should never be afraid to leave an organization if you’re not getting anywhere inside it.
Then, try one of these techniques:
Wait until your boss goes on vacation or a long business trip.
Go to a trade show, convention, or meeting without him.
Start cc’ing decision-makers up and out on your emails and memos.
The most dangerous of these techniques is, perhaps, to start cc’ing decision-makers outside of your normal sphere of influence. For this reason, it is a good strategy to occasionally have contact with these people so that the first time you do so, it isn’t to go over your boss’s head.
The safest way to begin contacting these people, by the way, is to cc them on a brag or win report, where you give credit to your boss and your team for a job well done. Nobody, not even your deadwood boss, is going to complain about the address list for that type of email.
Another way to access two levels up from you is to simply wait until your boss is on vacation or out of town. Invent a need for a management decision, and voilà, you have a reason to jump a level on the org chart. While there, carefully bring up your topic. Believe it or not, I did this to sell a book to my publisher that had already been rejected by my editor. The publisher liked the book, and when the editor got back from vacation, it was already on the publication schedule! This is dangerous and not to be undertaken lightly. I had taken the trouble to change the title and explained to my editor that the book was “quite a bit different” from what he had rejected, but truth be told, it was exactly the same book. My editor forgave me. Maybe your boss will, too.
Be aware that some bosses will not leave town without safeguards in place. They will insulate senior management from you with either a complete list of contingency plans or by putting a lateral in charge of you for the duration or, worst of all, by giving explicit instructions for you to stay away from the next level of management during his absence.
Some deadwood bosses never take vacations at all. One way that corporate security officers search for embezzlers and thieves is to search company records for employees who never go on vacation. Embezzlers are famous for fearing investigation and exposure during an absence, so they are never absent. Some incompetent people use the same protective strategy.
Suppose you try all of these techniques to get your message heard above the bell jar of your boss’s fearful ego. Before you stretches a future under your deadwood boss that is bleak and devoid of potential. Your best next option is probably to leave the organization and look for more fertile soil.
This is the point of schism, when your interests and your boss’s interests diverge: His interest remains to maintain a tight level of control on his sphere of influence, and yours changes from trying to make the best of it to just getting the heck out of there.
One warning: Creating a fight with your boss is usually just going to result in a bad reference. Exiting gracefully is always a good idea, and exiting gracefully from a bad situation is especially important. You never want to burn a bridge if you don’t have to. One client I worked with through a resignation wrote a letter of appreciation in which he said, “And I want to thank _______ for teaching me I could work successfully with all types of people and succeed in all types of environments.” The boss took it as a compliment!
You must sit through an exit interview and you will remember: Business is great. People are wonderful. If there wasn’t room for advancement, and you decided to look for better prospects elsewhere, just skip the opportunity to lob a hand grenade into your business unit and depart with your dignity intact instead.
In the movie, Jerry McGuire, Tom Cruise’s character writes an intra-office memo revealing all the hypocritical, self-serving practices in his office. He is fired within days. He then attempts to convince other staff to go with him, and all of his accounts are taken away. If you decide to throw a few shots at your soon-to-be-ex boss on your way out the door, the result is that you are almost sure to get injured in the process.
Only top executives should get involved in public fights with their colleagues, and only when the success of the enterprise is at stake. It is a moral obligation at that level to fight to the death for one’s ideas, if you perceive the penalty for failure to be the demise of the organization itself. But this is the life of the gunslinger. It looks glamorous, but you can only lose once. The penalty for losing, in all too many cases, is that your career is over. For almost everyone, the best schism is a quiet separation. You can go on to fight your battles in another organization, where you have a higher chance of success.
Losing at Golf
I spoke with several fast-track executives who told me that their desire to make their boss look good extends all the way to the golf course. “I absolutely will not beat my boss at golf,” said one, “even if I have to shank a couple into the trees. And you can always miss a putt if you have to. I’m at least as good as he is, but I only beat him once, and he seemed to be peeved about it. I never beat him again.” If your boss ever found out you lost on purpose, the cost in terms of loss of trust might be great. So if you decide to adopt a boss-management strategy like this, be smart enough to keep it to yourself.
You might think twice before annihilating your boss in any sport, be it poker, “Jeopardy,” darts, or picking up someone in a nightclub.
Does it make you uncomfortable to think about working to make your boss look good? Do you resent the idea that part of your mission is to cover for your boss’s mistakes? Is this type of activity already taking up way too much of your time and energy?
Then perhaps you have the wrong boss. You may need to get a boss you can support with minimal reservations. No one is perfect, but your boss and you have one of the closest bonds in business, and you share an interlocked future. If you cannot support him, maybe it’s time to look for an internal transfer, and if that’s not forthcoming, you may need to move on to a new organization.
Having an inspiring boss is motivational. If you are motivated, you will excel. If you excel, you will advance. It is a true career advantage to work around talented high performers. James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, is famous for saying, “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in trouble!” Being challenged by the best to do the best and be the best is probably going to launch you much further than standing out in a bunch of morons for the mere fact that you are not a moron.
Here’s what one fast-track executive said to me about his own amazing career success, switching from a low-level position in a nonprofit to a series of promotions leading to a director-level position for a $2 billion company: “Try your level best to make sure you’ve found the right job, in the right area, within the right organization, and whom you feel good about it. Make sure you’re working for a boss that you respect and admire, and who respects you and is concerned about your welfare and development. Your boss is critical. Those are the circumstances you need in place to have faith that your hard work and good ideas will be rewarded.”
Do you have to be an extrovert to make it to the top office? Absolutely not. Introverts are (on average) more creative than extroverts, and creativity seems to have much more career value than extroversion by itself. Although some studies I’ve come across say that people believe extroversion to be an advantage, the study that matters is from CPP, Inc., publishers of the ubiquitous Myers-Briggs test. They own fifty years of data from officially licensed tests, and they claim that introverts appear among the ranks of CEOs at about the same rate as they occur in the general population.
However, among women executives, extroversion seems to be much more of an issue. Women executives are about twice as likely to be extroverts as introverts, while men executives are only about half again as likely (pretty close to population norms). Even with these ratios, however, it remains true that one-third of women executives are introverts.
So how does an introvert survive in environments that favor the socially well lubricated? They fake it until they learn how to do it! They learn to appear extroverted! When it is important to do so, they can be as outgoing and expressive as any born extrovert. Many consider it just another skill to be learned, and over time they learn to turn it on at will. Interviews with introverted executives turns up comments like these, “No one knows I’m an introvert,” or “People would probably be surprised to learn that I consider myself an introvert.” They learn to act like extroverts when it matters, and then to retreat to the comfort of contemplative privacy in the hours of the day when it does not impede their effectiveness.
Either way—introverted or extroverted—you can learn to speak up and be effective on teams, whether that team is a board of directors or a batch of summer interns.
What’s More Important?
“If you love what you do, it doesn’t matter if you get promoted. If you don’t love what you do, you’re not very likely to do well enough at it to get promoted anyway. Bottom line, it’s more important to love what you do than to get promoted. The key to everything is to find something you love to do and then get someone to pay you to do it.”
—JEREMY W., O.D. CONSULTANT TO THE AUTO INDUSTRY
I was as an attorney with a law firm in St. Louis, doing very well, your basic junior associate, when I got a call from a friend of the family in [a Southern state]. He was going to run for sheriff, and he wanted me to help him win the election. I thought he was calling everybody he knew, but since he wanted me to run his campaign, that can’t have been the case. He was very personal and very sincere.
This call was totally unexpected, and it created quite a dilemma for me. I grew up around this guy. He was a close friend of my father’s. When I was a kid I used to play golf with them, and in college I’d been his office assistant for a couple of summers. He knew I could write a clever letter and manage administrative work flow. He knew I could think on my own and that I could be trusted. We’d always been active in politics, my family, backing candidates and helping with campaigns, but I’d never even thought about managing one.
Practicing law was a bit tedious. I could see the steps to partner, and just how that would play out for the next thirty years. It was hard work without being very interesting, but I had gone to a lot of trouble to get into a good law school and then get a job with a top firm. But then he said the magic words. “[Geoffrey], I want to be governor, and I think you can help me get there, step by step.”
I was hooked. I have a thing about power. I’m drawn to it like a moth to flame. So I got a leave of absence from the firm, making up some story about how this guy could be a useful client to the firm some day. They almost never give leaves like that, but my request must have pushed some of the right buttons, because I got a leave to go manage his campaign. We ran a campaign like [that county] had never seen. No baby was unkissed, and no problem lacked a solution. Obviously we won.
So I became the director of administration for this county. In [this state], the county sheriff is really the top elected official. He runs law enforcement, as you’d expect, but he also runs the roads, the tax collection system, senior services, the healthcare safety net, everything. It’s a big deal. Well this guy just turns to me and says, “You take care of all this. I’m going to start building the infrastructure for a run for governor.” You know what the last thing he said to me was? “Don’t make any mistakes. People are going to look at what we do here to see if I deserve to be governor. You’ve got two years, and then I’m going to run.” That’s all the direction I had.
So I ran this county for a couple of years. It was very exciting. I increased tax collections without increasing taxes, which allowed me to hire a layer of professional staff to oversee all the lifers we had to deal with in county administration. And I got my guy in front of the local news every week bragging about what a good job he was doing. The TV just loved him. He was a natural for media and I was behind the scenes, making it work. I just can’t describe to you how much fun this was.
Then, the governor’s campaign came along, and I discovered there was a whole new level. I taught myself how to use demographics, polling, voter data, zip code-level messaging, and all that. We hired the right consultants. My job was to spend his money to get the maximum votes, but his job was to go out there and get the money to spend. And he let me down. I am absolutely certain we could have won if he’d have delivered on the fundraising goals. We got beat by a better machine, and that’s how politics works.
Now I am doing consulting on tax issues for a political consulting firm. I don’t regret for a minute tying my career to this guy’s dream. It was my dream, too. Those three years were the happiest of my life, really. We were doing something really big. And I did make a difference, a real difference. That county still has some of the best administration in the state. More services without more taxes. That’s the best a government can offer.