ONCE, DALE EARNHARDT INC. was having a hard time with the press. The only pieces they were writing about us were gossip pieces that made us look bad. I felt like I was on the phone all day talking about irrelevant personal nonsense that was never going to help us move forward. I needed some way to get the press interested in writing positive, substantial pieces about the progress our company was making and all the good work our people did, but how could I influence the press? I had no special leverage, no magic. They were free to write whatever they chose and they didn’t have to answer to me.
I did know, though, that even top reporters were working people like me, with the same deep motivations: doing their jobs to feed their families and reach their dreams. So I made a list of the journalists I most wished would write something positive on us, and I called them up. I had personal conversations with each of them, and I asked them how their work was going and what was on their minds. Then I said: “Listen. If you want to go on scooping gossip, don’t bother calling me anymore. But if you want to break accurate news about our company, I will get it to a choice few of you as fast as humanly possible.”
Of course, I had an agenda, but pushing my own agenda wasn’t all I was doing; I was also showing what was in it for them. I could get them the scoops that would make their jobs easier and at the same time make them more successful. That got their attention. They started writing more substantive pieces, I stopped fielding so many calls about rumors and innuendo, and we were all better off.
The fact is, everyone is on the take. Everyone is always wondering: What about me? What can I get? That may sound harsh at first, but what it means is that other people are looking for personal benefit and gratification, just as you are. Just as I am. So although the recipe for success is a little different for each of us, the main ingredient never changes. That ingredient is benefit. If we’re going to work together, we have to do each other some good; otherwise, what’s the point? In chapter 3, I talked about the importance of appreciating others; now you need to make sure they appreciate you. To do that, you have to show what’s in it for them.
This rule has been the source of some of the most important opportunities in my life—even, to be honest, before I understood it. When I was still in high school, trying to do my best in academics, in sports, and as a member of the community, I didn’t understand that schools are like people and companies—they have self-interest, and they tend to reward the people who can help them meet their own needs and goals. I had no plan to do that when I applied to colleges, no understanding of how those things worked at that time, but our school principal, Don King, took the initiative. He had read an article by Monk Malloy, president of the University of Notre Dame. President Malloy had been a basketball player before he entered the priesthood and eventually rose to the head of the school administration, and his article said that Indiana colleges were not doing a good job of admitting Indiana students. Principal King read that article and remembered that he had once met President Malloy, so he called him up and said something like, “We met a couple of years back, and I understand that you need some good black kids. Here’s Max Siegel: he’s got great grades, he’s a fine athlete, and he’s president of his class. Will you take a look?”
I believe that phone call made the difference in my acceptance to Notre Dame, which in time led me to law school and everything that followed. Only later did I understand that my principal’s call succeeded because he was showing the university president what was in it for him and for the school as a whole: a chance to live up to their stated goals of accepting more applicants from within the state. We weren’t asking for a favor, we were helping them satisfy a need. And we kept doing it—over time, the principal recommended a few more students, and I would put up promising minority students in my room when they visited, to help them see why they might want to attend what was then a mostly white, mostly Catholic school.
THE CYCLE OF SUCCESS
OF COURSE, ONCE I got to college, all kinds of new opportunities opened up for me. It might seem obvious to say so now, but going to Notre Dame was an enormous change in my life, like moving up to the next league. It might never have happened to me, but once it did, I began to see that although success doesn’t come according to our plans, it moves in a kind of cycle. You face a challenge, you meet it, you show someone what you’re capable of and what’s in it for them, and you may be blessed to find that the cycle begins again, at a higher level. Now you’re on a bigger stage and there are greater rewards if you succeed, but the challenge is the same: show what’s in it for them. I suppose I knew it worked that way in sports—how excelling in your local league could get you sent to regionals, and winning there could get you to nationals, and so forth—but now I saw that a similar cycle is at work everywhere.
Mickey Carter and I benefited from the cycle of success when our first talent-agency client, John P. Kee, became well known. As John traveled, and even in his concerts, he would publicly thank us for being his attorneys and ask his audience to pray for us. Others who wanted to become recording artists, or who were recording artists already but hadn’t achieved the kind of success John was having, started to think about their lawyers. Many of them didn’t even have lawyers, but now it occurred to them that a great representative might be what they needed to move forward. So they began to seek us out. When they considered hiring us, they could see what was in it for them because we had gotten results for John and he was happy enough with us to say so. Our client list grew and our success expanded across the gospel music industry.
It reminds me of the parable of the talents, in which Jesus describes the kingdom of heaven as a man traveling to a far country. The man leaves his servants his money based on the abilities he sees in each one. One of his servants is given five talents of gold, which he uses to earn five more, and when the man returns and sees the result he says, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things.” That to me describes the cycle of success: right now, whatever funds or opportunity you have been given, you have a chance to use them wisely and increase them. If you do that, then like the good and faithful servant you will help to create another chance, this time with greater funds and greater opportunities. It’s not a “master plan.” You have to take each cycle one at a time. But it can lead to results that no master plan can achieve.
One day, the great baseball player Tony Gwynn, arguably the best hitter of our lifetime, found my name on the back of one of John P. Kee’s albums. He and his wife, Alicia, were interested in having John perform for some underprivileged kids in Southern California, where they lived. I was happy to help them arrange that concert, but my interest in them didn’t stop there. As I got to know them, and we began to develop a personal relationship, I learned that they had been robbed blind by Tony’s agent, who had robbed others as well. Forced to declare bankruptcy, they were now rebuilding. Tony was still young and already a star, so many agents would have liked to sign him up, but he was extremely hesitant to trust.
I knew there was an opportunity there, but I knew that any further success I could have with Tony and Alicia was going to come from showing what was in it for them, and that high on their list was going to be trust. As we got to know each other, Alicia began to ask me to handle a few small legal matters for them—responding to business proposals he was pitched, small disputes, and concerns having to do with the church. These were not the services that most people would have offered to provide for Tony Gwynn. Sometimes it was making payments on his existing deals or even picking up his car. Too often people look for the most glamorous or most obvious opportunity, but my attitude was that nothing he asked was too small or too big; nothing was beyond me or beneath me.
When did I pitch him on giving me a bigger role? I never did. I just made sure I was there to handle whatever came up. I was faithful to the small things without looking for the big payoff. Whatever they asked me to do, I made sure I got it done in a way that made them think, wow, look how much Max does for us. Look how beneficial it is to have him as part of what we do.
When our personal relationship was solid and the time was right, they asked me to become the Gwynns’ general counsel. Of course, for Mickey and me that was another huge step. Everyone in baseball respected Tony Gwynn, and along with his endorsement came new credibility and the chance to meet with and sign other players, to meet with the general managers and owners of teams and with the Major League Baseball organization. Once again, the cycle of success brought us to a higher level, because we had listened to understand Tony and Alicia’s needs and then presented our services in terms of what was in it for them.
DON’T SELL TOO SOON
HOW DO YOU SHOW others what’s in it for them? I want to start by describing the one basic mistake that prevents so many talented, promising people from turning one success into an ongoing cycle. That mistake is to start pitching oneself too soon. Even those who understand this as an abstract idea may find that when they sense an opportunity, all they do is toot their own horn: “Look what I’ve done! Look what I can do! Look at my great resume, my expensive suit, my big new ideas!” It happens to me all the time. People start pitching me on the services they want to offer my company, or the things they want to sell me personally. But while they’re talking, I’m thinking: Wait a minute, you may know my title but you have no idea who you’re talking to. I don’t really care how great you and the whatever-it-is you’re selling may be, because I don’t use those in my company. Or I have someone in the company already who handles that. Or you’re talking to the wrong guy altogether.
FOCUS ON YOUR CLIENT, NOT YOUR SALES PITCH
HOW DO YOU AVOID selling too soon? To begin, take the focus off yourself. Just like in a first meeting, when it’s important to put your own agenda on hold and take time to make the other person comfortable, so too if you want a long-term business relationship you need to set aside your agenda and focus on what the other person needs. When people go in selling first, they’re forgetting that in the art of the sale, the salesperson has no say. It’s the other person who is going to say yes or no, the other person who is going to commit—or walk away. Nothing matters unless that other person is moved.
I started my professional life as an attorney, and attorneys are not trained to be salespeople. Even so, we still have to sell our services to land clients. If we’re trial lawyers, we also have to sell the jury on our interpretation of a case. If we’re representing talent, we have to sell our clients within the industry to get them the most favorable deal out there. So in all those ways, lawyers, who are supposedly not in sales, still have to sell. And in fact, everyone’s work has an element of sales, even if your work today is to get the kids to settle down and get dressed so you can all get to the zoo.
As a lawyer, I learned that I had to be absolutely devoted to my clients. I made myself available at all hours of the day and night, and I was willing to do whatever I could to take care of them and ensure the success of whatever project we were working on. That devotion helped me to keep clients and to succeed as a lawyer. Then in time I realized that it isn’t just in the law that this is true. Whoever succeeds or fails based on your job performance is a “client.” Whoever depends on you to come through for them is a “client.” No matter what business you are in, you have clients, whether you call them by that name or something else.
The secret to success with clients, no matter what business you’re in, or even if you’re not in a formal business, is that they don’t need you all the time—in fact, most of the time they don’t need you at all. But when they really need you, you must have time for them. Day or night, when that call comes you have to go the extra mile and then some, and then some more. They have to see that you’re not counting miles; you’re committed to staying until you get results. Because while clients may be adults with power and responsibility, when it comes to their lawyers they want to feel the way children want to feel about their parents—they want to feel, “he was always there for me.” Some clients may not need you for years, but then suddenly there is a crisis and if you’re there, they will be grateful and happy for the years they paid you and didn’t need to call you. But if you’re not there when they need you, it’s as if you were never there, or you never had the right skills.
EARN THEIR TRUST AND DISCOVER THEIR NEEDS
ONCE YOU HAVE YOUR focus on your “clients,” you need to discover what they need—not in a general sense, but specifically. Anyone can promise and generalize. Anyone can say, “Baby, I’m going to make you a star,” or, “We offer an exceptional value proposition.” What’s rare is to be able to go beyond the smooth talk and the flash and show the other person that you have something specific that he or she needs. It may be a particular skill or understanding that others don’t have; it may be a quality of your relationship, like the trustworthiness and loyalty I offered the Gwynns. It’s up to you to figure out what that skill or quality is. To do that, you have to be able to answer these four questions:
Similarly, you might ask about what’s blocking their way, what they find frustrating about their job, or what they wish they could hand off to someone else. As with all listening to understand, it’s often best to leave questions open-ended. Allow room to talk about whatever they want to talk about, and remember that most people don’t get an interested listener all that often. They may need a little while to get used to it, and then they may say things they didn’t know they were going to say.
Finally, I try to remind myself that we’re all human, with human feelings and blind spots. That means that sometimes our feelings keep us from seeing—or daring to try—a perfectly good solution that’s right there in front of us.
BECOME THE ONE WHO CAN PROVIDE
NO MATTER HOW MUCH you can learn about someone else’s needs, or how inventive you can be about discovering how you might address them, in the end they are going to want more than your understanding and your creative questions. They’ll want results—practical, high quality results they can measure. How do I know that? Because it’s the same thing you would want if the situation was reversed. Imagine you hire someone to do a job for you. What do you want from them? It doesn’t matter whether your goal is to launch an ad campaign, meet a production deadline, get a new product to market, or repair your car. You want them to do the job they were hired to do—and do it well. Other people are no different. They want the same from you. If you can deliver high quality results, they will be satisfied and they will be inclined to work with you again. But if you aren’t up to doing your job, or if you don’t come through for those who depend on you, you can believe they will notice.
Maybe that sounds like something you already know, but again, it’s not an issue of knowing. You have to live it. I remember my mother, who never had a lot of patience for my father’s talk about working hard and waiting patiently to get a little of the real thing. She had many good qualities, but she was not interested in waiting for appliances and electronics. So she shopped from the Fingerhut Catalog, a poor man’s version of a credit card. I would come home for a visit from college and the house would be full of her new purchases—once it was a refrigerator, microwave, stereo, and television, all for $200. Meanwhile I had spent $600 on my television. She had a whole roomful of new stuff, and I had a bare dorm room with just a television. The first time I came home and saw her living room, I thought, wow, maybe she’s onto something. I was always on the lookout for a good shortcut, and I thought that maybe there was a shortcut my father didn’t understand.
Soon, though, my mother’s new television broke down. She had to get another and another one after that. Often what she ordered broke down before she even got it paid off. Meanwhile, my television worked for years and years. So the lesson seemed clear: when it comes to getting quality, there are no shortcuts. But again, knowing the lesson is just a small part of it. The challenge is to live that lesson every day.
HAVE THE PATIENCE TO BUILD YOUR SKILLS
THE APPROACH IN THIS book only works if you can deliver results. Delivering results means putting in the time to build the skills you need, whether you’re at the entry level, at the very top, or somewhere in between. You have to learn what it means to do your job well, and to understand who depends on you and how you can take care of them. Most of the failures I have seen have been made by people who got too far too fast, and didn’t know how to handle themselves.
Every kind of job has its core competencies, those basic skills that, when seasoned by experience, bring success. There is no substitute for developing those competencies and getting experience using them together. I see it among my colleagues in architecture or design, who have to learn to take a practical skill set (drafting, sketching, computer-assisted design, and so on) and unite it with their unique sensibility for what will compel a consumer in their particular industry. I see it among managers, who have to build an understanding of the overall operations of their organization while at the same time learning to listen well enough to hire and direct people who know parts of the operation better than they do. I see it in marketers and publicists, who have to take the time to learn how their consumers’ buying habits are evolving and the channels, old and new, by which they get their information. It’s different for every kind of job or business, but what they all share is this inviolable rule: you have to put in the time.
What if you don’t? Early in my career, there was a young guy at work who was always trying to one-up the rest of us, always politicking and trying to get an edge with senior management. Sure enough, by age thirty-five he had convinced enough people that he was some kind of genius. He was put in charge of a whole division. There he was, making all kinds of money, with an impressive title and a big, beautiful office. Meanwhile, I had been trying to learn my job as well as I could, so I could demonstrate some real results. After seeing him leap ahead of me, I have to admit that I questioned my approach. It had been pretty easy for me to watch my mother’s parade of broken televisions and draw my conclusions, but it felt different when it was my own life. I didn’t want to wait while someone else got all the perks. Why couldn’t I coast along and rely on my friends in senior management to get me a corner office? People succeed that way all the time, don’t they?
Yes—for a while. But I’ve learned that shortcut success doesn’t last any better than cheap knockoff televisions. You have to season your talents with appropriate experience. Otherwise, even when you can see the finish line you’ll find you can’t cross it. My colleague who had politicked his way into a high-level position, who seemed like he was sitting on top of the world, was really in over his head. He looked great but he performed poorly. His division fell behind the others in the company. When he had to make tough decisions, he didn’t have the experience to make the hard calls or to help his people through their doubt and stress. At thirty-five he was sitting on top of the world, but by thirty-seven he was just sitting around, trying to figure how to get back to being the next big thing. And he never has found his way back. He became known for his failures, and no one wanted to give him a big responsibility again. He had gotten his success without getting results, and it ruined his career.
My dad used to tell me, “A little of the real thing is better than five pounds of phony.” To him, owning one good pair of shoes was better than filling your closet with cheap ones. He believed that quality and substance stand the test of time, whether in shoes or in people, and so it was worth the wait.
SHOW THAT YOU CAN SERVE ANOTHER’S VISION
IT’S NOT ENOUGH TO develop the skills; you also need to show your clients that you will use those skills in the service of their vision. When I was working for Tommy Boy Records, the head of the company, Tom Silverman, lost his second in command. Once she was gone, others in the company sensed his weakness and began trying to wrestle control away from him. I knew that not everyone in the company was loyal to Tom’s goals, so as I worked on the tasks he gave me I also worked to show him that I could take his vision and make it operational. The music business can be a world of “me, me, me,” but I tried to show Tom that not only did I have the necessary creative chops for the job and the organizational ability to hold others accountable for their deadlines, I was also on his side.
In time he put me in charge not just of his gospel division, an African-American music form, but also of Artists and Representation (A&R) for the entire company, making me responsible for finding and helping to develop all our talent, black and white alike. I can’t express to you what a huge accomplishment that was; so often in the music business, black executives are limited to working with black artists. But while that was the specific issue in my career at that time, the fact is that whenever anyone receives a promotion or an expansion of responsibilities, it’s because the person bestowing that opportunity can see beyond the present arrangement of the company and imagine what in the new arrangement after the promotion will be in it for him or her. Tom Silverman’s choice to promote me took vision and guts, but it wasn’t charity: I had shown him what was in it for Tommy Boy.
FIND THE HAMMER
SO YOU’VE GOT THE goods, you understand how they’re valuable, and you’ve presented them sensitively, making clear what’s in it for the other person. But you’re still not getting the positive response you want. What’s wrong? It may be that you’re not talking to the right person—or rather, that someone in the background shares responsibility for your client’s big decisions. Most people tend to lean on others for guidance. They ask, “Should I take this job? Should I invest in this company? Is this what’s right for me?” The most influential advisor may not be visible right away—rather than a manager or parent or spouse, it might be a choir member, a grandmother, a distant friend. You may never know who else has to sign off on what you want to do unless you establish the trust that lets your potential clients share their concerns and show you who has the influence. Once again, you may not be able to learn everything you need to know directly; you may need to get to know your clients better, in some ways, than they know themselves.
Once you identify the key advisor, you may need to meet with that person yourself. As a talent agent, I found this all the time when I was hoping to sign up college athletes. My partner and I learned that we might have to make two trips, one to visit the athlete at school and another to meet the parents back at home, because no matter how the kid dominated when he was playing ball, he still went home at night to get advice. That’s why our motto was: find the hammer. If you want to build something, it’s not enough to have a pile of lumber and a box of nails. Nothing’s going to get built until you find the hammer.
With Tony Gwynn, too, I would never have succeeded had I not recognized that he made his big decisions along with his wife, Alicia. She was the one who began offering me small jobs to complete for them, and as I did those tasks she was the one observing to see whether I was committed to her and to Tony as people or whether I was only looking for a big score. Had I not recognized that she was as important a decision maker as her husband, or had I tried to go around her to get to him, I might have missed the chance to know and to represent one of the most important figures and families in my life.
HELP THEM WITH THEIR BAGGAGE
SOMETIMES, EVEN AFTER YOU focus on the needs of the person or organization you want to work with, and even after you earn their trust and demonstrate that you have the skills they need—not just to them but to their most trusted advisors—you still can’t close the deal. At that point, you might feel like you’re hearing that old breakup line: “It isn’t you, it’s me.” But just because you find that the person or organization you want to partner with has some personal issue or some old baggage that holds them back, that doesn’t mean it’s time to walk away. If their baggage is too heavy, offer to help carry it.
When it comes to sensitive issues that scare people away, it may be enough to acknowledge that some subjects are sensitive, then make it clear that you will leave those topics alone. I know that this approach works because it has worked on me. Back when I was in college, after my baseball career ended, there was a wealthy Mennonite family that provided jobs and housing for a lot of the Notre Dame athletes over the summer. The family loved sports and they were charitable people, but part of their motivation was to have an influence on our behavior and our development. In particular, they wanted to encourage us to go to church. Back then, though, I hadn’t yet discovered how valuable that could be. And especially once I got to college and I was free to do as I pleased, I was definitely going to take issue with anyone who wanted to instruct me on how to live my life. But they never lectured us or tried to micromanage us with rules. The family seemed to understand the kind of personal baggage that young college athletes would carry, and how they weren’t going to be receptive to someone acting like their parents. They didn’t lecture or preach. They just made one simple request: we could come and go as we pleased, but would we please go to church on Sunday?
To me, the interesting thing was that they succeeded. They had an impact on me spiritually. Not because they tried to persuade, but because they let me observe for myself that they were very successful in business, while at the same time they seemed like compassionate human beings. I observed how they lived, and how the family was close; going to church was part of that life. Mennonites come from a Swiss-German tradition that preaches pacifism (in other words, not a group of people I had spent time with or even knew much about), but what I saw spoke to me. In fact, I think all of us who were their guests walked away from them and from Notre Dame changed, because we had an example of a family like that. And to the degree the message got through to us, I think it was because they understood what might provoke an unhelpful reaction in young men away from home for the first time, and they shaped delivery of their message to avoid provoking us with lectures. They inspired me to reconsider attending church because they helped me with my emotional baggage.
Emotional Baggage
After you consider the other person’s objectives and the impact what you want to do might have on them, take some time to consider what you know about them emotionally. Before an important conversation, or when I feel things are coming to a turning point with someone important to me, I ask myself:
For each conversation with an important connection, prepare a short list of reminders, mentally or in writing, of what you know to try and what you know to avoid.
I suppose that experience with the Mennonites was in the back of my mind in the days after Junior decided he would leave DEI to drive for another team. He was a very volatile person, very passionate, and when he suffered over something people often responded by walking on eggshells. It seemed to me, though, that this extra care only made him feel worse.
In the days after he made his announcement of his plans, I ran into him at the track during a rain delay. I could see he was feeling badly. Some people, I suppose, would have assumed that once he made his decision to leave my team, there was nothing more for either of us in having a relationship. But I didn’t see it that way. What I did see, by this point, was that in order to keep that relationship going, there would be times I would need to help him with his baggage.
“You seem like you’re in a crappy mood,” I told him.
He looked at me and didn’t say anything.
“All right,” I said. “When you’re ready to talk, you’ll talk.”
I thought we were done, but he said, “Maybe you’re the person who could cure me.”
And so as we waited out the rain, he began to tell me that he was scared to death that he might have made a mistake in leaving the team, and that everyone in the sport would be angry with him. I told him, “Listen—now that you’ve made your decision, you need to look forward. Don’t second-guess yourself. Do what’s in your heart. And if there’s anything I can do for you at DEI, let me know.”
“Are you sincere?” he asked.
“Of course I am,” I said. “Your success is as important to this company as its own success. You’re still a part of this family.”
Up to this point, I had never tried to have a social relationship with him or with Kelley, but now he said, “Maybe you could come over to my house. We’re having some people over this weekend.” By his “house” he meant Whiskey River, his 160-acre resort.
We began to talk regularly about his career. And as I’ll describe in chapter 7, there were benefits for both of us and for our respective teams, benefits that would be essential to my work to help increase diversity in NASCAR, the focus of my work with the Drive for Diversity program. That possibility remained open because I could help him in this way.
SKILL AND DEDICATION ARE NOT ENOUGH
OF ALL THE RULES in this book, show what’s in it for them may be the one that people most often mean to follow, but don’t. Yet it’s so important to focus on the needs of the people you want to do business with that I want to tell a story of failure—one even more startling to me because it befell one of the most promising and ultimately successful young professionals I ever had the chance to mentor. She had all the skill and dedication to her work that anyone could hope for, yet she needed something more before she could realize her amazing potential.
My friendship with Ann began when she came to my firm for a short internship, to see what we actually did in a law firm. She fit so well with what we were doing that we asked her back over the summers while she went to law school. Ann was outgoing, hardworking, very smart, and personable—I wasn’t surprised when she graduated law school and was hired to work in-house for an extremely prestigious business. Her career seemed to be taking off, but then she ran into difficulty.
The woman Ann reported to had many more years of experience, but she wasn’t outgoing like Ann. She was more introverted and she kept to herself. When Ann went to meetings or company gatherings, she talked with everyone she could, but her supervisor didn’t see that as valuable to both of them. She saw it as a problem. The supervisor began leaving her out of meetings and not inviting her to events, even when they related directly to Ann’s work. Ann felt stifled and uncomfortable, like she was being kept in a box.
When it came time for her performance review, Ann got wonderful evaluations, the kind of e-mails that you save, except from her supervisor, who was lukewarm. She made a number of criticisms Ann didn’t hear from anyone else. Then came a restructuring of the division, and Ann discovered she had been bumped down a level. When she said she felt demoted, the supervisor told her, “Well, now you have something to work up to.”
When Ann and I discussed the situation, she understood that her supervisor was afraid of being upstaged, but she insisted that wasn’t her intent. She told me, “In my mind I felt I could never outshine her—she was so much more accomplished in the profession and she had so many more years of practice. If I did a good job, didn’t I make her look good? Wasn’t that a mutual benefit?”
I told Ann, it ought to be enough just to have the skills and to do a great job, but in the world of human emotions it’s not always that simple. Your job is always more than the work that you produce, no matter how good it is. Take a step back and consider what makes this person tick—which in this case seemed to be fear. You may not be giving her reason to fear for her success or for her job, but if that’s the baggage she carries, if that’s what she’s primed to hear, it doesn’t matter if she’s wrong. Perception becomes reality. She’s going to feel afraid anyway and her fear will make her hold you back. She needs reassurance.
Ann was very young then, and she was naturally direct. She felt that if there was an issue that needed discussing, then you should come out and discuss it. She went to her boss and said, “Look, I really don’t want your job. I don’t know that I would even be interested in it. And anyway you have fifteen years on me. Do you feel like that? Do you feel that I want your job? Because I don’t.”
Ann hoped this would address the boss’s fear, but instead it shut the boss down. She gave Ann a stunned look and then changed the subject. They never had the frank conversation Ann had hoped would clear the air. It may be that exactly what frightened Ann’s boss about her was how bold, confident, and fluent she could be in a charged situation—qualities that the boss lacked. The fact that Ann could speak openly about the boss’s fear of losing her job only seemed to make her boss more afraid, and she continued to find herself left out of important meetings.
What had gone wrong? Ann had the skills to do her job, and she even had insight into what made her boss tick. But she wasn’t able to put those insights to use because she had never fully established trust or shown her boss that she could meet her emotional needs. What did I suggest? I told her I thought she had a good understanding of the fear that made her boss tick. But knowing what makes someone tick doesn’t always mean that you can work with her. You can’t own someone else’s feelings. Maybe, I said, you’ve done the best you can with her and now you need to find a work-around.
I encouraged her to form a relationship with her boss’s boss and with some other allies who might, in time, help to pull her out of this situation. Not to complain to them about her boss, but to establish her own relationships. Ann worked in a field where a lot of the business was social, and as she encountered them in open, social settings, she found chances to ask them about what they were trying to accomplish. She also volunteered to work on certain projects just so she could be around those important folks in the company. As they became comfortable with her and saw that she could serve their goals, they began to come to her directly. Although her boss was too afraid to see the benefit in expanding Ann’s responsibilities, these others in the company were not.
When Ann’s supervisor noticed the change, she couldn’t do much, because now Ann had her own relationship with her supervisor’s boss, the head of the organization, and if he said he wanted her on a certain project or present at a particular function, the supervisor could only say, OK. There was still tension in the relationship, and Ann left about a year later for another job, but the problem was contained for long enough that she could leave on her own terms, for something better.
Of course, a new job doesn’t mean you escape your old challenges. At her next job, her boss was already a friend. This time they were closer in age and in experience, but that can also be dangerous; it’s easy in a competitive setting to feel threatened by someone you see as similar to you. As Ann saw, this boss was like the previous one in that she was very smart and hardworking but, compared to Ann, an introvert. Ann wanted to make sure that this time she prevented an emotional problem from developing, rather than trying to deal with it afterward. So I asked her, what are you doing this time that’s different?
Ann said she was making a point of deferring to her new boss, offering opinions when asked but making sure her boss felt that Ann was not in any way trying to take over, and that the boss was in charge—after all, that was her role. In this new job, things went much better. Ann’s boss was comfortable in the relationship and pushed her to take on additional responsibilities in her company, some that went beyond Ann’s legal training. But had Ann not been sensitive early on to addressing her new boss’s needs and showing what the benefit could be in letting Ann soar, it could easily have gone wrong.
THE FASTEST CARS AT THE TRACK
FOR ME, ONE OF the proudest examples of putting these principles into practice came when we consolidated the three different racing shops at DEI into one. The physical campus had always been broken up into a number of different buildings, and each one of the race teams had a shop dedicated to that one team. That meant that even though we had multiple teams, we weren’t getting any of the benefits of working together: we weren’t sharing information, comparing practices to see which was best, or achieving economies of scale.
The planners and engineers told me it would be most productive if all of the functions were handled in one building. That way all the cars could come off the assembly line in one place, with all of our experts focused on building the best possible car, and then giving each one the small final tweaks it needed for each individual driver. But although the experts agreed it was best to build all the cars in one place as a matter of engineering efficiency, psychologically the different teams were used to thinking of each other as competition. They hid their breakthroughs from one another and behaved as if their goal was to beat the other DEI cars.
I started talking to everyone I could about shifting focus from the individual teams to the organization as a whole. Instead of trying to keep their new developments to themselves, I wanted everyone working on the cars to share their competitive edge so the whole organization could be stronger. It was just as exciting to compete as one big team against the other teams as it had been to compete internally, every shop for itself, but I had to make the case to them in a way that acknowledged their expertise and their accomplishments.
The result was that these once separate shops consolidated and started turning out some of the fastest cars in the sport. In the qualifying runs at race after race, DEI cars were up front—and not just one car, but three or four together. During this period we were weathering the reaction to Junior’s decision to leave and then the downturn in the economy, and it was a huge accomplishment and a huge source of pride to be able to point to our cars as they won the qualifying runs and say: look what the people of this company can do.