THERE HAVE BEEN DAYS when I’ve doubted whether my rules could get me where I needed to go. Not because the principles I’ve described aren’t effective, but because it can seem that following them is too much to do. I can’t be everywhere at once—even with the best technology ever devised. I can’t talk to everyone every day. I can’t learn every language or force people to listen to me when their minds are closed. Over time, I’ve noticed that those moments of doubt are strongest not when I’ve had setbacks, but when I’ve had big successes. A new opportunity opens up for me, or I’m blessed with the chance to conduct my business on a much larger stage, and the question arises again: will these simple rules still get me where I need to go?
If you think that motivating people by knowing what makes them tick means extra work for you, you’re right—but don’t worry. You don’t have to do it alone. As soon as you start helping others to be heard and be taken care of, you have the chance to make them your ambassadors. They will carry your messages, solve your problems, take care of those who rely on you, and guarantee your success in ways you could never do on your own. What starts out seeming like extra work winds up making your life easier.
I remember when I became president of DEI and I met my four hundred employees for the first time. Of course, I couldn’t “meet” them all, not in a personal sense, but Teresa Earnhardt, the owner of the company and my new boss, held an event so that everyone could raise a glass of champagne and welcome me. She wanted me to introduce myself to the company and make clear why I was there and what I wanted to accomplish.
Five minutes before it was to begin, some of Teresa’s people came to me, saying, “Do you know how important this is? These people are going to rely on every word you say. And you know, a year from now, they’ll remember any promise you make. Are you ready?” I thought to myself, oh, my.
The kind of nervousness I felt at that moment was familiar, and it went back a long way. It reminded me of being the new kid at school (as I had been so many times), the new guy at work, or the new boyfriend meeting the family. This time, there were hundreds of people I had to connect with, reassure, and inform, but just as in all those past situations, I was facing a big room filled mostly with strangers and there was no way I could take my usual approach. I couldn’t chat with each of them one at a time, to put them at ease and draw them out about what made them tick. Had I outgrown my rules? I definitely felt like the outsider, and at that moment being an outsider felt nothing like an advantage.
At the same time, I knew Teresa’s people were right. This was my chance to make a good first impression, and it mattered. There was a lot of work to be done at the company, starting with a huge problem of morale. The workers didn’t know who was in charge; they hardly seemed to expect good leadership anymore. Where there should have been open communication and a clear chain of command, there was chaos and confusion. I was supposed to be the guy who would change all of that, but for now I was just the unfamiliar face who had to convince hundreds of people that I belonged at the head of their company.
What did I do? First, I thought about those four hundred people and what their goals and feelings might be as they listened to my speech. I put aside my concerns and thought about theirs. What was important to them? It seemed to me it came down to two ideas:
When the time came for my speech, I tried to be as honest and as emotionally transparent as I could be. I told them that it was intimidating being up there in front of all of them, and that so far, since I had arrived in Charlotte, everything was going horribly. I told them I had promised my wife that when I came to DEI, I would have a less stressful job than at Sony/BMG, but that already there was more stress. I told them how I had promised her she would be glad to get away from the snow in Indianapolis, but the first day we got down to Charlotte, it snowed. I said I knew I had my work cut out for me.
Then I talked a little about who I was and what values I brought to my new job. I acknowledged that I didn’t come from racing and implied that as an African-American I was different, but I stressed the core values I believed we all shared: a strong work ethic, an appreciation for people, and a belief that as president it was my job to do everything I possibly could to support them.
Most of all, I told them that no matter who we all were, the common legacy of Dale Senior bound us together like a family. We were all there together to honor him. When Dale had raced, he had mainly worn the number three, and that inspired me to offer a new mission statement based on three goals:
When I had explained this new mission statement, I asked them all to come up and sign a written copy, as a symbol of the goals we shared. That gave everyone a reason to come up to the front of the room, if they felt like it. As they did, I watched to see what would happen, looking for nonverbal signs of how I was doing. In other words, even as president of the company, and even as I faced hundreds of strangers, I was making use of the same approach I described in chapter 1, to get below the superficial niceties and begin to connect with people in terms of what makes them tick.
How did it go? As employees came up to sign the mission statement, some stopped to talk to me. Some had done a little research on me, as I could hear in their remarks. A few said things like, “Hey, Max, I listen to Kirk Franklin” (or another Zomba artist), as if to show that whatever our differences, we could connect through the music. Some found things in common with my hometown (“My grandmother lived in Indianapolis”) and that sort of thing. I wasn’t all that concerned with the particulars of what they said; what mattered to me lay underneath the words. I was listening to understand whether they were open to connecting with me or trying to keep their distance. I found that there were more people trying to find ways we could connect than those trying to show me how we were different. That was how I measured the success of my speech, as a start toward finding what we had in common and how we could work together.
But it was just a start. I came home that night reminded that my one-on-one techniques could never be enough to succeed with a big group. I didn’t have the time to do it all myself, no more than singers can perform live for everyone who might want to buy their albums; no more than politicians can shake hands with everyone whose vote they need to win. I needed to find some ambassadors.
AMBASSADORS GET YOU HEARD
AN AMBASSADOR IS ANYONE who bestows good will from one group to another group, making it possible to establish relationships so you can all work together. Some ambassadors move between countries. Others go from management to the shop floor. I needed ambassadors to go between me and my new employees. I also needed ambassadors who could talk for me to the greater community.
Ambassadors may be members of your inner circle or strangers you’ve only met today. They may have formal leadership positions or they may only be social leaders. The president of a company or a country is a natural ambassador, but so is the receptionist who talks to everyone coming in and out of the door, or the person who pushes the donut cart through the halls, making conversation along the way. The power of ambassadors comes not from their formal titles but from the personal credibility they have in their group, a credibility that lets them influence their group to welcome an outsider or to close him out.
When do you need an ambassador? Whenever the people you need to partner with for success can’t hear you. Sometimes, as in my example, there are too many people to reach one-on-one. Sometimes the people you need to connect with might be too afraid, angry, or uninformed to give you a chance, which means they won’t be listening to you no matter how much you talk. Sometimes they are willing to listen but you don’t speak their language, either literally or because of some gap in your background that makes it hard for you to grasp what matters to them. The bigger the opportunity, the more likely that you can’t succeed without the right ambassadors.
When I gave my introductory speech at Dale Earnhardt Inc., I knew that what I said didn’t matter as much as what the influencers and the tastemakers in the company and beyond were going to say about it afterward. Even more than at some other companies where I had worked, I knew that being president didn’t actually give me much credibility—it might even have hurt me. As I’ve said, by the time I arrived, our people didn’t even expect management to lead. It had been a long time since the team had won a race, and few seemed to believe that management could help them do that. To change that perception, I went looking for an ambassador to inspire trust and confidence, a natural leader with a real understanding of excellence in racing who could help me restore trust in management. But where to begin? I was brand new there myself.
I’ve already described part of the way I tried to put my fellow workers at ease and learn what mattered to them. I traveled from race to race not on the owner’s jet, but with the team. Every day when I went to the track, I wore the team competition uniform, so everyone would see that I wasn’t just the new “suit.” I was part of the team. I spent a lot of down time with our employees, eating, drinking, and talking in the back of our haulers or in the motor coach lot, so I could hear their concerns and their perspective on what was really going on with the company. Just by being there, I was letting them know that while I might have a different background and a different job title, I didn’t think I was any different or greater than they were. I was showing them that I wanted to help them do their jobs better. So far, though, the only ambassador was me. I was the one doing all the work of listening and spreading the word about how we could improve the company.
The people who really knew what made the company tick kept mentioning one name, Rex Garrett. I kept hearing that he ran “the best gear shop in the sport.” Now, most people don’t even know that the gear shop is where they work on the drive train, and that the drive train, arguably, is the most important component of a competitive racing vehicle besides the motor. The gear shop just isn’t a sexy area of the sport. But Rex Garrett had been with the company for eleven years, doing this unsexy and crucial work, and those who worked with him had noticed. Again and again, I heard that he was focused, organized, dedicated, loyal, smart, and an incredibly hard worker. He had tremendous credibility in the company. Here, I thought, was a potential ambassador.
When I met him, I confirmed all that I had heard, and I learned something else about him: he was about to quit. He wanted to make a bigger impact on the company than his job allowed, he wasn’t getting the chance, and he was just about sick of it. But instead of letting him give notice, I elevated him to director of Motor Sports Operations. Now he would oversee manufacturing for the entire race staff. He had a platform from which to put his ideas into practice, and he sprang into action. Rex had ideas about how processes could be reorganized and made more efficient, and he found ways to cut costs. He identified co-workers whose opinions were not being taken seriously enough in the company and others who could perform at a higher level.
As he got to work, the benefits came fast and they were amazing—for the company, for him, and for me. Pride in the company shot up because I hadn’t brought in someone from outside: one of their own guys had worked hard and gotten recognized. Respect for me shot up as well, because everyone saw I knew enough to trust in others when they had more experience than I did with the daily workings of competitive racing. Rex was inspired to work twice as hard as before, doing an amazing job identifying and addressing issues all over the company. And once he was in this new position, as he appreciated that he and I were trying to reach the same overall goals, he started to make it his business to explain that to people. All over the company, he told people, “You have no idea how many problems Max is working on. You have to see what a tremendous job Max is doing.” A couple of sentences like that from a co-worker they respected did more for me with my employees than a dozen speeches and a hauler full of champagne. There was literally nothing I could have said or done that would have been as effective for me as what he said on my behalf. He had become my ambassador.
THE FIRST LEVEL: CREDIBILITY
THERE ARE A FEW levels to the work an ambassador can do for you. The first and most important is also the simplest. You need an ambassador to connect with people you can’t connect with yourself, to validate your credibility. To help you on that first level, ambassadors don’t have to share your whole vision or understand all your plans. They just have to clear the path for you, removing the obstacles that keep people from giving you a chance. Often it’s as simple as someone saying, “Have you met Jane yet? She’s all right. You ought to hear what she’s got to say.” But far more important than any particular words an ambassador says or doesn’t say, at this early stage, is how they use their own credibility and authority to change the way others see you and hear you. Like the music in a church service—or, to take a very different setting, like music in the background at a party or on a date—what the ambassador says changes the mood in which people listen, helping them hear you better and guiding their response to what you say and do.
How do you find an ambassador? To begin, look for people who have the influence in their community to open people’s minds. It can be the shop foreman or the gossip at the water cooler—anyone who gets attention, anyone who gets heard. The writer of the newsletter. The person who keeps a jar of candy on her desk so everyone will stop by to chat. What you need from them was summed up in that old shampoo commercial, where two people try out the shampoo, and they tell two friends, who each tell two friends, who each tell two friends, until word has spread exponentially. Because what mattered to me was not just that Rex Garrett talked to people on my behalf, but that he got conversations going that started other people talking: “Did you hear what Rex said about Max Siegel?” He wasn’t just giving me compliments. He single-handedly launched a finely tooled word-of-mouth marketing campaign.
The idea that ambassadors can create a domino effect on behalf of your credibility is both cutting edge and very old school. The cutting edge term is “viral marketing,” something I’ve used with success in both the music business and racing. Viral marketing relies on people with “high social networking potential”—that is, ambassadors—to pass along messages that then spread on their own from person to person like a virus. With the advent of the Internet and cell phones, there are all kinds of high-tech viral marketing campaigns: people share video clips, images, games, text messages, and so on with their friends and the people in their personal or professional social networks, and these viral messages about a particular brand or product carry extra weight and credibility based on who sent them to you.
As much as I appreciate these high-tech forms as an aid to my business, I also like to remember that these new methods are just ways to reproduce with technology what has always happened when an ambassador gets out a message. When Jesus gathered his disciples, and they went out as his ambassadors to spread the word to others who spread the word even further, that was viral marketing, old school.
So whether you’re using the latest social networking site or old-fashioned conversation, there will always be an opportunity to influence people in this way, because people will always have a need to know about the new people and ideas that appear in their lives. Most people don’t want to do that work themselves. They don’t want to gather all the facts and analyze the character of every new person who comes in the door, or every opportunity that comes their way. Instead, they rely on those they trust or admire, because it saves them time, adds to their understanding, and keeps them in harmony with their group.
I even see it happening spontaneously with my kids. The oldest will tell one of the younger ones: you had better listen up now or you’re going to be in trouble—and sometimes his message gets through better than the same words from mom or dad. Or if one of the kids is afraid, another may say, “It’s okay, it’s going to be all right,” just as Jennifer and I might do—but when they get there first, they can often deliver the message more effectively. I’ve noticed that they do this without anyone asking them to; it’s a natural part of the family communication. People will always have that need for help in understanding events around them and making decisions, so there will always be an opportunity for effective ambassadors to spread their messages.
INFLUENCE FOLLOWS ATTENTION
HOW DO YOU IDENTIFY the people who can do that for you? Locating people with influence doesn’t require any special gift or sophisticated technique. Whatever environment you’re working in, you need to spend time with the people you want to work with, listening and watching until you can follow the flow of attention. Don’t be distracted by behavior—just because someone acts self-important or talks a lot doesn’t mean they have a lot of influence. Look instead for the person to whom attention is paid. Whom does everybody talk to? Whom does everybody talk about? The person who gets attention in a group can influence that group.
WHY SHOULD AN AMBASSADOR WANT TO HELP YOU?
ONCE YOU’VE IDENTIFIED POTENTIAL ambassadors by the influence they can have in their realm, you need to motivate them to work with you. I’ve noticed that for some people I’ve tried to mentor, this step feels mysterious and difficult. It’s as if they can’t come up with any reason that others would want to speak up on their behalf. Doing your own part, on the job or in the community, is one thing, they tell me; but this ambassador business—isn’t that something different?
My answer is, no, it’s more of the same. When you hope someone will become your ambassador, even in a very limited way, you’re proposing a kind of partnership. In every partnership, our rules apply. To move someone to work with you, you have to offer them the possibility of mutual benefit. Rex Garrett had dreams and goals of what he could accomplish at work if someone would give him the chance, and I gave him that chance. There was benefit to him in being my ambassador, and that’s why it worked.
Of course, I was president of the company, so I was in the position to give Rex Garrett a promotion. But I don’t mean to suggest that your ambassadors will necessarily work for you, or that you have to offer them something that very few people can offer. That idea would only reinforce the wrong impression some people have, that gathering and inspiring ambassadors requires you to offer some special compensation. So is there a secret to influence after all?
I suppose the secret is that influence is a lot less complicated than some people make it out to be. Most of us on the planet, including almost everyone you would ever hope to have as your ambassador, have the same basic desire. What most people want is to feel that someone understands and appreciates what they go through in their lives. In other words, we’re all waiting for someone else to notice us, acknowledge us, and help us out with the things that make us tick. So if you’re looking for a secret to motivating your ambassadors, you might try an old Biblical principle: do unto others as you would have them do to you.
Notice that it’s not just a negative principle—it’s not just don’t do what you don’t want done, don’t kill, don’t lie, don’t steal, and so forth. It’s positive: do. Do give others the attention, the sympathy, the help and advice, the trust and the loyalty you wish someone would give you. Do it whenever you can. Of course, I’m not perfect. I have my own motivations and shortcomings, but this is the ideal I try to live. It is the heart of my approach to leadership, which is to lead by serving. If I am conducting a performance review for one of my employees, I try to imagine what would be best—most comfortable, most informative, most useful—for me if my performance was under review, and to offer that to my employee. I am the leader, but I lead by serving the employee’s needs.
As a result, when I identify someone as an influencer who might benefit me as an ambassador, I begin immediately to get to know what makes him or her tick, so I can discover what benefits I can offer.
There is a kind of magic in this approach, and it’s not that you get a reward for handing out favors. What makes the difference is that when you offer someone help, freely, you show that person that you are not just out for yourself; you are committed to finding some mutual benefit together. So once again we come back to basics: you are helping them to achieve whatever it is that makes them tick. There is nothing more likely to inspire others to become your ambassadors.
I’ve seen this approach work in every business I know. It was crucial to me when I was just starting out. When I first started work at a law firm, I ran into a wall. I wanted to focus on sports law, but I quickly learned that almost no one in the firm considered that a viable route for a young attorney. It was a typical dilemma for a new hire in any kind of business: the company might have brought me in partly because of my fresh ideas, but once I arrived I clashed with the organization’s accepted ways. In this case, most of the senior attorneys didn’t even recognize sports law as a legitimate legal specialty—they just viewed it as an excuse to run off to games and hang out with players. The underlying problem was that billing in sports law was different than in other practice areas. Most of our firm’s business was conducted on the traditional model of billing a client for each hour you worked. But in sports and entertainment, lawyers are paid not by the hour but as a percentage of each deal they close with a player or an artist. As a result, you may work for weeks or months with someone before you can bill them for anything—and to someone unfamiliar with that approach, it may look as if you’re not working at all, because you’re not filling in your billable hours on your time sheet every week.
I was under a lot of pressure from senior attorneys to change my focus when I found an ambassador. Jack Swarbrick had a long-standing reputation at the firm as a smart, effective, and well-respected lawyer. I discovered that we shared a passion for sports, and that while he had begun his practice doing intellectual property work and billing hours the traditional way, over the years he had expanded into a general sports practice that the firm had come to accept. Jack was glad to find a young attorney like me, who was interested in his specialty and eager to learn how he had made a success of it, and he became my ambassador, acting as my supervisor, my cover with the other senior partners, my manager, and my public relations representative all at once. In time, he introduced me to the mayor and the governor. He helped me make connections that led to my being appointed to the city Arts Council and the Parks and Recreation Board, helping to get my name out and to make connections that could further my success. And everywhere I went, I told people how he was guiding me and shaping my development as an attorney.
But our relationship went beyond the familiar one of mentor and protégé: just as he had become my ambassador, in time I became his. Jack was an extremely accomplished lawyer, but he was not a self-promoter; he didn’t seem to appreciate how much people valued his opinion, not just on legal matters but on business ones as well. As I gained his trust, I encouraged him to offer his services more widely, so he could have an impact not just as a lawyer but on the greater community landscape, whether in sports, business, or industry. He began to be offered positions on corporate boards, not just as legal counsel but as chair. He was instrumental in the campaign to move the NCAA headquarters from Kansas to Indianapolis, bringing jobs and prestige to the city. He did the same for most of the national governing bodies of Olympic sports. He became known as a gatekeeper and pillar of the amateur athletic community, both collegiate and Olympic. Then in 2008, when the University of Notre Dame was looking for a new athletic director to run what many consider to be the premier collegiate athletic program in the country, they found what they were looking for in Jack Swarbrick. The same techniques for finding one’s ambassadors that had gotten me established as a newcomer to the company had led him to his dream job, the crowning accomplishment of his career.
THEY DON’T ALWAYS COME ACCORDING TO PLAN
YOU WON’T ALWAYS FIND your ambassadors by making a conscious plan and taking intentional steps to meet and connect with them. Like opportunities in general, the best ambassadors may turn out to be the ones you wouldn’t anticipate, didn’t seek, and couldn’t arrange. Sometimes they might even work for the competition or play on the other team. Two of my most important ambassadors in NASCAR, for example, have been Dale Earnhardt Jr. and his sister, Kelley Earnhardt-Elledge. (To fans and to the general public, Junior, the star driver, is the name that’s well known. But Kelley is his agent, his business manager, and the general manager of his organization. To team owners, administrators, and sponsors in the sport, she is the heart of his business.) As important as they have been in establishing my credibility, I never sought them out as ambassadors.
As I described in chapter 1, we met as adversaries in a very tense negotiation. That difficult negotiation, however, didn’t stop me from taking an interest in them and trying to learn what made them tick. I tried to understand what would be best for Junior and Kelley and to offer them help achieving it. Both before and after Junior made his decision to leave DEI and race with another team, I told him: “Look, everyone is selling you on where you ought to be. But at some point you have to do what makes you happy and not try to please your fans or me or even your sister.” I backed up my personal advice by being as helpful as I could. Sometimes there were relatively small things he needed to get done at DEI to move his career forward, such as getting approval from the company to endorse a new sponsor. Relations between the two siblings and the rest of management had grown tense, but I would do what I could to ease the tension and get approval for actions that would be mutually beneficial for all of us, such as a product endorsement that was stalled. Sometimes when Kelley had a strong plan in mind and Junior wasn’t convinced, I could be the outside voice saying to Junior: yes, that seems like a wise business move. Sometimes Kelley and I talked about her own career path and how she could continue to grow as a professional herself.
Soon, some very interesting things began to happen. Kelley and I were seen chatting together in front of each other’s haulers, getting along just fine in the middle of the controversy. Our collegial relationship made a statement that was picked up by the media: I wasn’t making a choice between the two Earnhardt siblings and Teresa, who was their stepmother and my boss. At the time, there was a tendency for some journalists and fans to treat Junior’s departure like a divorce and take sides, but Junior and Kelley were giving me the chance to show the fans a more positive approach.
The more I was able to have a positive impact on Junior, the more he felt inspired to tell people about me. Increasingly, both of them were asked, “What’s Max like?” Kelley spread a lot of goodwill for me on the business side of the sport and Junior spoke to the other drivers and crew members and to the press. From his first interview after he met me, through the conflict over whether Junior or DEI would keep the rights to drive the number eight car, he kept telling people that I was working as hard as I could to solve problems. And after DEI merged with Chip Ganassi Racing, and I left to take over NASCAR’s Drive for Diversity program, he told the New England Racing News: “He may be pulling the wool over my eyes, but I like him. He is a really good guy in my opinion. I hope that he’s involved in the sport for quite some time.” Just as nothing I could have accomplished within my company could have done me a fraction of the good that came from the opinion of an ambassador like Rex Garrett, nothing I could have said to the press could compare to the benefits of having Junior and Kelley as my ambassadors.
That Junior and Kelley played that role for me came as a surprise to some people in racing, and at first, to be honest, I was one of them. But while I didn’t see it coming, I recognized that this is the sort of result you get when you stick to your “rules.” That experience reaffirmed for me that when it comes to motivating other people to be your ambassadors, your focus shouldn’t be on manipulating the behavior of the people with the power to spread goodwill for you, but on making sure that your behavior toward them remains consistent with the goodwill you want to generate.
WHO HAS TIME FOR ALL OF THIS?
YOU MIGHT BE WONDERING: doesn’t this approach take a lot of time? Am I suggesting that you have to talk to everyone you know every day, listening to understand, appreciating them, and so on? Some people imagine I must spend my days (and nights) in nonstop conversation. But who has time for that?
The answer is, no, I don’t. I try to treat everybody I meet the same way, pleasant and friendly, but I don’t waste a lot of time. I talk to very few people a lot, and I don’t expect you to spend all your time talking, either. The key is to be sensitive to the ways in which each relationship has its natural rhythm.
When I had my first meeting with Junior and Kelley, it was one short meeting, but I could feel the potential for a relationship to grow, and I made a point of following up with them. There was a period when we were in contact very frequently. But once you have given a relationship its foundation, it’s not necessary to be in contact frequently. With my best friend and former partner, Mickey Carter, for example, I may go three months or more between conversations, but still I get more from talking with him once in three months than from some people I talk to casually every day.
To manage my time while still connecting with people in the ways that matter so much, I do three things.
HIGHER-LEVEL AMBASSADORS
SO FAR I’VE FOCUSED on how ambassadors can provide you with the basic acceptance and credibility you need to start the conversations and the relationships that will move you toward your goals. Beyond validating your credibility, though, there are two further levels at which your ambassadors can be crucial to your success: they can promote your agenda and they can share the burden of leadership.
Ambassadors can translate and promote your agenda.
I want to make clear that an ambassador provides more than a reference. He or she is not just someone who will say on your behalf: “Oh yes, so-and-so worked for me or with me, and he or she was productive and reliable, a great worker, etc.” Or: “Sure, so-and-so is a good guy. He was in my car pool/church choir/poker game.” Of course, it’s helpful to be able to provide references when you are trying to establish a new role, whether at work or in social situations, but a reference is essentially a passive summary: a reference confirms facts about what you have done in the past. By contrast, an ambassador promotes your agenda now, going out of his or her way to influence people’s opinions and to build consensus to support you. They don’t just confirm facts about your past; they help others to imagine that you could help them build a successful future.
My first important ambassador in this sense was my sister Traci, back when I wanted to start an agency representing sports and entertainment figures. I had no connections in the industry when I was starting out. My first idea about how to get my foot in the door of the music business was to use my father’s old connections. So I started to call people my dad had known. I even offered to work for free in the industry to get experience. What happened? No one was interested. I’m not sure anyone even called me back. I was nobody yet in the industry, and I was treated as a nobody.
My sister, meanwhile, had established herself in radio. She was general manager of a station in Charlotte. As I described in chapter 2, she was the one who suggested I meet John P. Kee, because he was having such success with his music and his ministry that he needed representation. I’ve described how I went down to meet him and how we bonded by playing basketball, but the fact is that even connecting with him in that personal way might not have closed the deal for my partner and me.
When Mickey and I drove down to meet him, John P. Kee was already very hot, with lots of people offering to represent him, including lawyers and managers well known in the gospel world. He had long-standing relationships in Charlotte, while Mickey and I were just visitors from out of town. We all had a great personal connection from the start, but these other factors weighed against us.
That’s where Traci was so important as my ambassador. She knew John personally, so she had his trust. She was accepted within the Christian music community, so she could vouch for me in the terms that were most important to John as a minister. Just as I would later go between my secular boss at Zomba and our Christian artists, translating their needs into terms the other side could understand, she translated me into John’s terms. Finally, she was a success in the music business, with experience programming Christian music on her radio station, so she could make the case that I understood the business side as well. At that early stage, I wasn’t the one who best understood John’s deep motivations and how to help him imagine the success he could have with Mickey and me. Traci did that for me.
Once I began representing John, he then became my own biggest ambassador. People would call him from all over the gospel world and beyond, saying, “Tell me about Max. What kind of work does he do? Is he cool? Does he respect your vision?” Both Tony Gwynn and Reggie White, when they were getting to know me, contacted him as a respected minister with strong Christian values who could give them an assessment of me, even though they were in sports and he was in music. But John didn’t just give me a good reference; he vouched for me and promoted me, saying, “You ought to get together with Max. You will be so glad that you did.”
Ambassadors share in the burdens of leadership.
At the highest level, an ambassador goes beyond preparing people to listen to you, or even promoting your worth or translating your words, and begins to speak for you, almost in your name. This happened to me with a very gifted assistant, Ayana Rivera, who worked with me for many years. As we continued to work together, she came to understand both my vision and my style, and often she could answer questions that people had for me as well as I would have answered them myself. Most people felt that if they talked to her, they talked to me, which saved me an enormous amount of time. I came to rely on her not just to prepare the way for me, but to act as a leader herself, almost as my second in command.
The most important ambassadors you can have are those people who can speak for you, expanding your range by influencing people you don’t have the ability or the time to reach yourself. Finding your ambassadors, in other words, is the beginning of gathering your leadership team. When you look at effective leaders anywhere, whether in business, politics, church, or family, you find that they surround themselves with co-leaders whose qualifications go beyond their job skills. What makes a team effective is that in addition to competence, they share a common vision, a similar style, and an ability to deliver a consistent message.
A TEAM OF SERVANT-LEADERS
THE APPROACH I’M DESCRIBING in this book, based on knowing what makes people tick, is at heart an approach to leadership. You may already recognize yourself as a leader or you may find this idea surprising, but from the moment you first try to see where someone else wants to be and how you can get there together, you are both a servant, helping the other person toward what he wants, and a leader, showing the way. It doesn’t matter what your job title may be or if you have no title at all. You might be the head of your corporate team or a new hire, but you’re a leader as soon as you imagine a vision of mutual benefit, and as soon as you assist others to help you realize a vision.
How do you recruit these high-level ambassadors? You shouldn’t have to recruit them at all. Don’t go interviewing strangers for the role. If you have been following the approach in this chapter and in this book, you will already be drawing people to you, some of whom will already be your ambassadors in lower-level ways, vouching for your credibility and translating your approach for others. Listen for the ones who understand not just that you have some worthy goals, and not just what you have said in the past, but what you are likely to say in related situations in the future. Look for the ones who can understand the agenda behind your actions, and those who take it upon themselves to work for your larger goals in ways you haven’t even requested. That is, look for the ones who show themselves to be servant-leaders. They are presenting themselves to you; it’s up to you to recognize and select them. Sometimes you’ll do this formally, by offering them a position or promotion in your organization or group. In other situations, the selection is more informal, as it was when Junior and Kelley began inviting me to socialize with them. Either way, it’s a clear chance to deepen the relationship and shoulder some of your burdens together.
I’ve written a lot already in this book about motivating ambassadors at the lower levels, to speak for your credibility and to promote you and your goals. But how do you motivate at the higher levels? Are there special techniques of leadership that only come into play once you are gathering a whole team of ambassadors to serve as your co-leaders? There are not. One of the biggest mistakes I see successful people make is to toss aside the principles and approaches that built their success because of a confused idea that now they have outgrown the old rules. All the old rules still apply; the question is how to apply them on a bigger stage, with more actors and more at stake.
Motivating ambassadors to share the burdens of leadership is not any different from moving anyone else to do anything. You have to make clear the mutual benefit. And the most powerful benefit you can offer is you. The ambassadors who will work hardest, feel most loyal, and get the most done for the leader they serve are the ones who think, “I’m glad he or she was put in my path. I’m glad to be part of this. Serving in this way is the best way for me to reach my own goals.”
Try a thought experiment to test out this approach. Imagine that you are an influential person in your organization or group and that I’m the new guy in town. I find a way to get introduced to you, and you have to decide what you think of me, whether you want to associate with me, and what you’re going to say about me to your many colleagues, friends, and other connections. What do you want? First of all, you probably want to know if I “get” you—if I’ll take you seriously, respect your feelings and your situation, and offer my sympathy and support. More than that, you’ve probably got some goal you’re working on for yourself. Wouldn’t you like it if I could help you toward that goal? But beyond all that, if you’re going to accept me as your guide and leader, for an afternoon or for the rest of your life, you probably want to think, “Wow, this one is the real McCoy. He knows what he’s doing.” So the question is not: “How do I get my ambassadors to do what I want?” The question is: “How can I be the leader that makes others think, ‘I’m glad he found me’?” And the answer is to be the kind of leader you would wish for—someone who has talent, integrity, honesty, and commitment. Someone who gives credit where credit is due and doesn’t forget the people who helped him. Someone who inspires hope.
Those are lofty goals, but to work toward them it’s enough simply to focus on staying true to your principles. I’ve found that when I do, there is a further benefit for me. If I become known for living by the rules in this book, then others may seek me out and try to associate themselves with me in business or in the community exactly because they feel that my values or my success will reflect well on them. My mentor in the practice of law, Jack Swarbrick, says that working to benefit others is actually a kind of “social capital” that you invest by seeming to give it away for free. The investment pays dividends when ambassadors and others decide that the best thing they can do for themselves is to find a way to work with you.
AMBASSADORS EXTEND YOUR SUCCESS
THE RIGHT AMBASSADORS CAN take you farther than you could believe possible, and the wrong ones can stop you in your tracks. I saw what a difference the right ambassadors make when I represented gospel star Fred Hammond. When I met Fred, he was already a success. He had played bass and sung with the Winans (the Jackson 5 of gospel), then joined the group Commissioned. Fred could sing, write songs, arrange them, and produce them. While he was still in the band, he also launched a solo career that we eventually brought to Verity Records. He was wonderful to his fans, generous with interviews, and he began racking up Grammy, Stellar, and Dove awards. Even so, writing, playing, and singing great songs wasn’t the end of what Fred could do. He was creating a new genre of gospel music, but he would need the right ambassadors to do it.
In any religious service, whether in a church, synagogue, mosque, or wherever it may be, there is a part of the service set aside for acknowledging the goodness of God, for singing God’s praises and offering worship and gratitude. This tends to be a highly traditional and “serious” part of the service, for example, when the old hymns are sung. Fred’s innovation was to create music for the “praise and worship” portion of the service that was respectful of tradition, but to do it in a cutting-edge musical style. For the first time, praise and worship was being given fresh appeal for young people in the cities and for a more casual audience beyond the church context. To make an analogy to pop music, it was as if he had taken an old soul or R&B song from back in the day and created a dance remix that appealed to a whole new audience, but, of course, doing it with religious music had a special significance.
Fred was the first to pull it off with religious music, and he created a new genre: urban praise and worship. As my wife, Jennifer, describes it, this music makes you want to fall on your knees and cry out, “Holy, holy, holy!” They are songs that make you want to give yourself to the Lord. This more accessible music drew new listeners, both the young and the less devout, into one of the most important aspects of worship.
But even during the 1990s, as Fred became one of the most popular praise and worship leaders in the field, I could see that he hadn’t reached his full potential. He was that rare artist who was also a visionary and a businessman, with the ability to take a concept and follow it all the way through. And at this point, when he began trying to realize the full scope of his vision for gospel, his efforts began to stall. The difficulty wasn’t any lack of talent or personal commitment; it was the mismatch between his goals and his ambassadors.
Fred’s life had not been easy, and after coming through hard times and betrayals, he had surrounded himself (as so many professionals do) with an inner circle of close family and longtime friends who had been with him from the beginning. But that approach, necessary in the rough, early days, began to hurt Fred as he grew more successful. Once, he was asked to appear in a concert, a worthy cause, but for less money than he had become accustomed to receive. I suspected he might do it anyway, as a blessing in the industry. But his manager took a hard line, angrily demanding more money as if Fred had felt insulted, and in the fight that followed Fred lost the chance to perform at that date entirely.
I was upset, and not just about the lost opportunity. Fred had a unique way of engaging people—though he was a big man, it was not his way to yell or intimidate. He was a quiet giant, mild mannered, a healer and a mender. When Fred handled a negotiation himself, even if you disagreed with him about how much he should get paid, you could still walk away feeling that he was a friend. But as his success grew, he could no longer handle every negotiation and arrangement himself.
There were fights over travel arrangements, about lighting design for his shows, and about the creative choices related to his sound. There were showdowns with record company executives with whom Fred had to keep working afterward. The ideas that Fred’s people were fighting for were often fresh and exciting; had they been presented differently, people might have felt, “Wow, Fred is raising the style of this whole operation.” But the way the disagreements were handled by his ambassadors left people telling one another, “You know what? Fred’s a pain in the neck.”
Beyond their interpersonal difficulties, Fred’s ambassadors also lacked experience with the more complex business situations that his success now required. He was beginning to extend his reach in gospel, becoming a producer for other recording artists and investing in other ventures in the music business. He even built a recording studio. But as the scope of his operations grew, a number of the creative people in his inner circle—who did not share his gift for business or his larger vision for gospel—began to feel uncomfortable. There was jealousy and infighting among those who shared his creative gifts but had not developed an understanding of his larger vision for success in the industry.
For example, Fred and his inner circle shared an admiration for Sean “Puffy” Combs. They saw how Puffy hired a variety of different songwriters to work on his albums and then traveled around the country with them as part of a big, creative entourage. Like Puffy, Fred was drawing talented songwriters to his projects, and so a similar entourage formed around him. But the people handling his business concerns weren’t considering the implications of putting all these songwriters and musicians on salary and letting them travel with Fred for long stretches of time. They could have been paid by the project, but instead they were receiving checks every month, whether they were writing songs with Fred or not. Not only was this arrangement a huge expense, it meant that he was surrounded by a large number of people, not all of them well known to Fred or especially loyal.
The bottom line was that people in his organization were imitating another artist’s approach without considering whether that approach would help them reach their own long-term objectives, both creative and financial. I believe these ambassadors meant well, but they were having the opposite effect from what was needed:
When I stepped in, it was to offer Fred another approach. I told him that I understood how important it was to him to stay loyal to the inner circle that had been with him from the beginning and to take care of the people closest to him, but that it didn’t make sense to give those people responsibilities they couldn’t handle. At the same time, though, I told him that as his success kept growing, he couldn’t be everywhere at once—booking his engagements, managing his office, representing his company, dealing with his staff. He needed ambassadors who could speak for him, who not only shared his vision but also conducted themselves as a reflection of his vision and his style. I wanted to help him understand that he was such an amazing person, he needed to hire people who would give the outside public the same kind of feel they would get if they dealt with him directly.
TAKE STOCK OF YOUR AMBASSADORS
TO HELP FRED SEPARATE his inner circle from his ambassadors, I asked a series of questions that I offer to anyone who is questioning whether they are being well served by those who speak for them.
When Fred and I had to tell people who had worked with him for a long time that he wanted them to serve in different ways, it was painful. Some recognized that they were not effective and chose to leave. Some he had to let go. Some took it well, some didn’t. When my advice challenged a long-standing relationship, it was hard for him to reconcile at times. Some of his toughest-talking ambassadors didn’t understand the new approach he wanted to take. They asked him, “Are you getting in bed with the record company? Don’t you know that if you get too close you’ll get hurt?”
I knew that to build his trust in my new approach, we had to start with smaller changes, so he could see what results we got. Slowly we made the bigger changes in his team. In time, his accomplishments began to grow in ways no one could doubt. Not only was he making more money, he was getting more exposure for his music and his religious message, and he helped to launch successful careers for other artists. His record company sought him out for musical concepts, marketing ideas, concerns about working in partnership with ministry, and guidance in resolving conflicts with their other artists. His influence and credibility grew. When DreamWorks decided to make The Prince of Egypt, the first major animated movie based on Biblical stories and intended for secular and religious families alike, they came to Fred for an understanding of the entire gospel music world as they developed the soundtrack—which would go on to win Oscars for best song and best musical score. Now he was helping to shape people’s opinions of the whole gospel industry.
I helped Fred analyze his team in terms of his needs for ambassadors, but I think the growth in his career came most of all from an inner breakthrough. He began to rely more on himself and his own gifts. There’s a myth out there that says if you don’t want to be taken advantage of, you have to be tough and combative. But to me the thing that was amazing about Fred was his presence; often what he didn’t say spoke louder than any tough talk. He could understand the need to stand up to his record company, for example, but also see that the reality of business is that no matter how adversarial a relationship might be in the beginning, once you close the deal it’s a partnership. And in any kind of a partnership there is give and take. It was a proud day for me when I learned he was telling interviewers, “Max showed me how to get what I wanted without having to pound my hand on the table.” When he trusted his own style and gifts, and surrounded himself with ambassadors who could follow his distinctive style of leadership, he took his success to new heights.