Lessons I’ve learned from business

First, most of the actual work that makes an organization productive is done by a small minority of the employees. And the bigger the organization, the smaller that class actually is relative to its size. In my dad’s office, he tells me that the nurse practitioners do almost all the actual work. And in my business, and I think in many others, this is also true. That’s where the day to day production that keeps the world turning happens.
Typically, those people are highly conscientious, agreeable people (and often women). They want to please you, and they have very high standards, and they will work themselves far harder than you could ever make them work. Their internal drive to perform and to please creates such an internal taskmaster that you, as a manager, could never hope to match.

As a manager, your primary job is to identify and protect those people and their work. To clear their path of obstacles so they can get down and do it. You may think your job is to lead the sheep, the mass of the other less productive employees around you, but really your job is to manage them so they don’t get in the way of your workhorses, and make sure they follow behind and back them up.
If you spend a lot of time whipping the sheep, and you’ve left the horses mixed in, you’re just going to discourage them and frustrate them and make them want to leave. They’re already going to drive themselves, and extra pressure like you would need for the sheep will just break their spirits. You just need to make sure the path is clear, prevent them from getting frustrated by the more wayward sheep getting in their way, and give a light hand of guidance to make sure they’re going the direction you need them to go.

The worst mistakes you can make are:

1. Whipping and driving them excessively. They don’t need it and it will make them feel like their efforts and self-criticism and striving, which are already monumental, will never be enough.

2. Getting in their way by constantly trying to change their direction. They fundamentally want to knuckle down and go places and get things done and actually do the work and validate themsekves by accomplishing things. And if they feel like you’re constantly changing direction and the measures and the destination, they won’t feel like their work is being valued or used well. It will make their efforts feel pointless and make you seem like an incompetent idiot who doesn’t know what he wants and is wasting their time. Quite likely they hate wasting time in meetings, unless they’re obviously productive and have an effective goal and result.

3. Letting other employees get in their way. This can take many forms. One thing I’ve learned is that if you don’t identify and discriminate between your highly competent employees and your less competent employees and don’t tailor your approach to reflect their efforts and status, you will create massive problems. Incompetent employees who see themselves as being on equal standing to their far more competent coworkers will go on to create havoc everywhere they go and will make the good employees miserable. You have to recognize and value and reward success and competence, or you won’t protect and preserve it.

If an employee who works themselves twice as hard as your average employee feels like they have no value over someone who is fairly lazy or incompetent or difficult, that the value of their compet nce isn’t recognized or understood, they will lose the will to keep doing the work. And since it’s in their nature to always give 100%, that just means they will want to quit. If they can’t be that 100% person for you, they will just look for somewhere else to be that person.

Worst of all, there is a small chance you might actually break their spirit and destroy the very thing that’s great about them and cause them to actually descend to the level of their peers. This will result in fundamental disappointment and self-loathing on their part, because that’s not who they want to be. So they’ll get terribly unhappy, and so become even more damaged. They want to be their best selves. Your job is just to remove the obstacles that prevent them from achieving that, or at minimum don’t actively make it harder.

Good employees dislike poor managers because they prevent them from being all they could be, and want to be, and they mangle their very ideals of the universal, compelling need to achieve, produce, and please. These people are miracles, and we need them. If you can’t tell who they are and can’t protect them, you will never succeed as a manager. I have so many stories from my own experience, and also from my father’s, that have proved this to me. And almost all of them are stories of personal failure. I know because I have paid the price. And occasionally, reaped the benefits.

So, those are some of the biggest mistakes a manager can make when it comes to managing people. There are of course lots of other things that can be a problem with the larger mass of employees, but if I had to give priority to one skill that all good managers need to make their workplace successful, or at least avoid disaster and the constant wasting and degeneration and loss of their most important assets, it’s this. If you can’t sort this out, your production line will always be fundamentally broken and dysfunctional. You might keep it afloat by churning through employees, floating the value of your organization, but you’ll always be chasing problems.

I think if I could pull out two lessons from my more general experience, it would be:

1. Know what specific qualities you actually need and are looking for in your employees, not just their skills (which are teachable), but their character (which largely isn’t). And have a good idea of what you’re able and willing to teach and what you aren’t, and learn to balance the two. Is it worth hiring someone who already has experience in that area, but who you might not be able to teach to be good at customer service or working well with others? What do you want to spend your time helping them with, considering how much time you have and what you’re good at teaching? Because perfect employees are rare.

2. Never underestimate the negative potential of an employee. I’m an optimistic boss, so I hope for and expect the best of people, and boy have I been disappointed. If you go by your own idea of how far someone might go, how badly they might react, how unprofessional they might act, you’re completely missing the mark of what’s actually possible. You need to hope for the best, but you need to be prepared for the worst

That nice, well-educated, upper middle class girl might have a hidden vindictive streak a mile wide. That nice, smiling boy (sorry, I hire young people mostly) might have completely failed to learn how to treat people in a professional environment and might make every person who works for you angry and have them refusing to work with him. I have been stabbed in the back, threatened, stolen from, criticized, abused for my efforts at kindness, punished for my fairness, had vitally necessary concerns ignored, and been lied to more times than I can count, all by people I judged to be part of a very elite group I personally wanted to work for me. Never underestimate how pathological and dysfunctional some very nice people you wanted to be great can actually be.

I’ve talked about this before, but my interview style is heavily weighted toward getting a person either to relax, by asking them lots of meaningless personal questions and just trying to get them talking so I can actually see who they are and what they care about, or by deliberately disrupting the expected structure of the interview so they’re forced to reveal their true selves through improvisation and adaptation, when it takes a turn they couldn’t prepare for. Because I’ve learned that almost anyone can make themselves sound good for an hour. So you need to get past their expected questions and answers and get to the real underlying data by forcing them to face situations they didn’t expect and so reveal their true selves.

Most of the time this means just trying to suck them into casual conversation about something, anything they care about. And if I can’t find anything, then I don’t hire them. They haven’t matured enough to care. And caring, having agency, is the first quality of a good potential employee. If it’s not there, you can’t make anything of them. They have to care about something.

I’ve also done interviews with my girls at the table, in the dark while repairing light fixtures, and while doing various other tasks. How people handle these situations, when they can’t sit down and have to follow me around the store, or have to contend with my children interrupting them, actually tells me a lot about how they would handle the sort of tasks my work will demand from them. I once got someone to admit they used to be hooked on prescription painkillers this way, and there is no way they were planning on revealing that in a job interview. Not that I held that against them, in fact their story of how they got off them was extremely informative. But they weren’t planning to tell it to me, yet nothing could have been more informative for me to hear about.

I’ve had several employees cry in front of me, I’ve pulled things out of them or noticed things about them their own families had missed (by their own admission). And often the secret is to not be afraid to strategically put yourself out there. If you don’t fear revealing some of yourself, if you’re confident enough, you can do it on purpose and set a precedent that others will compelled to follow. People can’t help, hearing a good story, to want to share theirs.

It’s almost an instinct. Maybe it’s competitive, maybe it’s sympathetic, maybe it’s the desire to join in the fun. But if you take off the gloves that keep you safe, your expected role and questions and position, and get in thete and get your hands dirty and open up a bit, take down the walls, the other person probably will too. Talk about your bad experiences at a job, your failures, your difficult stories. And they’ll want to contribute their own, even if they never meant to share that stuff.

The person who knows how to deliberately surrender the most control externally (how to unleash themselves) while maintaining the most control internally has the most power in any social situation. This holds across so many situations. Let’s say you’re angry. Often, to resolve anger, your deepest need to feel that the cause of your anger has been fully heard and understood and appreciated by someone (ideally, the person who it’s most meaningfully adjacent to, most responsible for either soothing or responding to or solving or taking responsibility for it).

How successful you will be at that largely depends on the balance between your ability to most fully and completely express your anger so it can be understood and your ability to control and focus it internally so it can be productive and deliberate and targeted. Uncontrolled release of anger is neither productive nor comprehensible not purposefully directed. Completely internally controlled and repressed anger has the exact same problems. It doesn’t produce anything, won’t be understood or be helpful in showing or teaching anyone anything, and it won’t serve or be used toward any purpose.

So, that’s an example of what I mean. The most powerful person is a truly dangerous person who is in control of their dangerous capacities and has learned how to make them effective for communication and accomplishing their purposes. And by dangerous I don’t mean simply negative. Dangerousness is simply a function of effective power, and power can come from anywhere, even from kindness and care and self sacrifice. Anything with real substance is inherently dangerous. How effective you are in an area is a function of how greatly you can develop your powerful capacities while maintaining internal control over them so they remain useful and purposeful and creative and productive and instructional.

A huge tree is far more dangerous than a blade of grass. The dangers are inherent in how huge it has developed to become, and the regulation of that danger is dependent on how solid and effective the structures that guide and control th at development are (the healthy or less healthy ways it’s growth is directed and expressed).

Anyway, I’m off in the weeds again, as so often happens, but I do have one final insight about being a manager to share. And it’s about the limitations of being a manager, the need for humility, and the importance of valuing those good employees. The larger and more complex your workplace is, the more likely it will be that you will not have personally, directly done the work of your employees. And the larger and more complex it is, the harder it is to fully know what’s going on around you, what’s working well, what’s a problem, what needs managing, what needs cultivating. You only have so many eyes and so much time, and you only have so many hands and so much time.

So how do you actually know how to help? The answer is, learn to identify and cultivate your keystone employees.
Those people will understand their own jobs and care about them far more than you ever will. They will know what the problems and the needs are far more than you ever can. So all you need to do to be a great manager is just to find them and get them to talk to you, and they’ll tell you everything you need to know. It will still be up to you to decide what to do with that information, to integrate it all and act on it, that’s what a manager does.

But all the real intelligence is out there for the taking if you just know how to access it. If you try using external signs, such as certain measures of results like sales or productivity (however you define that, the numbers), it can give a general idea of what’s happening, but you’re going to miss out on an enormous amount of detail of why it happened.

Numbers are only as helpful as the meaning structure that you use to interpret them. And if you have an insufficient understand of the actual on the ground conditions and processes and work and results that created those numbers, the conclusions you draw will range from inadequate to blantantly misleading.

If I had to pinpoint the one quality that sums up the duty and skillset of a manager, I would not say that it’s vision or inspiration or brilliance or negotiation. It’s discrimination. The ability to see what is good and healthy and promotes life and growth, and to see what is bad and harmful and promotes dysfunction and disease. As a manager, your essential job is to keep the good things in and keep the bad things out. Protect the good, empower it, resist the bad, weaken its impact.

It’s basically the same skill set as being a gardener. You can have all the great ideas for landscape design in the world, all the vision, all the creativity and brilliance, but when it comes to making the actual garden happen and grow, if you can’t keep the weeds out and keep the good plants watered and healthy and growing, it’s never going to happen. It will always be a mess. Add in some challenging circumstances, and that’s all it will take to tip the garden into chaos, and it will stop being a garden and just become a wilderness again.

Discrimination is the fundamental capacity that separates order and purpose from chaos. If you don’t have it, and if you aren’t prepared to act on it, you’re not ready to be a manager. There are many tiger roles you could take, many other jobs that you could succeed in. But you can’t be a good manager. If everyone were naturally good and perfect, if every employee was a keystone employee, overflowing with conscientiousness and a desire to please and work with others, there would be less need to be discriminating. But if everyone was a keystone employee, then we probably wouldn’t even need managers, or at least would need far less of and from them.

A manager works to serve their employees, as a gardener works to serve the garden. Because you’re trying to build something bigger than any one of you, collectively, something bigger than yourself. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a need for other employees. And each one of them has a stake in its creation, a part of the design and flowering that they constitute and produce. Your job is to clear waway anything that prevents that floweing from helping. Making sure they’re in the right place to get what they need to grow and bloom. Make sure to remove the weeds that steal the life out of everything around them.

And weeds know how to survive, they know how to steal that life, they know how to promote and propagate themselves and push forward their rough blooms aggressively. They know how to take the credit and discredit the growth of the other plants, how to hide the damage they’re causing, and they’ll be very quick to project blame onto everything and everyone else around them for the roughness of their own growth.

Those agreeable, conscientious plants, ok, workers (the metaphor is wearing thing) don’t know how to do that. They prefer to concentrate on the work, on the building, and let it speak for itself, because their inner critic and expectations of themselves and desire to please make it almost impossible to engage in criticism of others or pass blame or engage in self-promotion. All they can see is the things they desperately need to accomplish and the demands they need to meet and please.

That’s an enormous vulnerability if they’re ever up against a weed employee in a competitive environment. That’s not their skill set. And a manager who isn’t sufficiently attuned to the real qualities of their workers and the problems his or her workers face won’t have enough real insight to be able to spot the danger.

Those weeds always have an alternative explanation. They always have a means to stay put and survive at the expense of others. Sometimes it’s taken a whole group of my good employees getting mad at once and sending a representative to me and warning me that they all want to quit to wake me from my stupor and make me realize just what a catastrophe I’ve allowed to occur. If your nicest, most agreeable and eager to please employees are all angry and upset and depressed, you’ve done something catastrophically wrong. If your hardest working, most competent and productive employees feel like they can’t do their jobs and are feeling powerless and unappreciated and frustrated and ineffective, then you’ve done something catastrophically wrong.

Goodness needs to be recognized and appreciated and rewarded, as much as pathology needs to be cured and resisted and guarded against. The failure to love goodness is just as terrible an oversight as the failure to fear what’s poisonous.

If your leadership has made your best workers effectively unable to be who they want to be (and who you want then to be, too), then you have completely blown it. If they can’t be that person at your workplace, then they will find somewhere else to be that person. And you will be left with the weeds you refused to pull. And don’t mistake me, pulling those weeds is often painful and difficult. They’re hard to remove and they’ll likely prick you with their barbs when you try. But if you don’t, pretty soon that’s all you’ll have. And you can’t grow a garden by constantly replanting your flowers among the weeds.

Goodness builds incrementally, but poison spreads exponentially. One bad apple can, indeed, spoil the whole bunch. Three to five good employees can be hamstrung by one bad one. That’s why management is actually so important. Not for the reasons you might think, because you’re so great and brilliant, but because the work of so many people is at stake if you don’t know how to protect it.

So that’s my philosophy on management and some of the lessons I’ve learned. It’s not an exhaustive philosophy, these are just the things that have really stood out to me through the years because they’ve caused me the most suffering and/or benefit. Managing people is only one part of what I do, but it’s pretty important, because it deals with all the work that goes beyond what I can (or even want to) do. I couldn’t do it all myself. So that means I need people.

And people need management. Management needs discrimination, a little courage, a little kindness, a little insight, a little listening, a little good judgment. It needs a knowledge of and love of the good, so you can recognize it and cultivate it, and it needs a fear of what’s poisonous and dysfunctional, so it can be restrained and rehabilitated and removed.

Life is a garden, and learning to be a leader means learning how to care for it, not control it, nor leave it to the weeds. If you love it and help it grow, no matter how big or small it is, you’ll help make something beautiful and full of life. You won’t make something that’s all yours, just a reflection or expressing of you, but something bigger and greater that you help everyone serve and become. The idea, the vision, the purpose, the thing you build and grow in all its many parts that others have helped make, and indeed make it up.

My body isn’t my brain, even if my brain is in charge of managing it. The brain can’t move itself or filter my blood or make food for itself. It would die if left alone to do all that. Every part of the body is an important and essential part of its identity and function, not just the head. To rule is not to subsume others into your overwhelming identity and purpose, but to submit your own purpose for the organization and care and flourishing of the whole, in each and every part.

That is the burden of leadership. And we each carry it in ourselves in the structure of our own body, even in our invividual cells. And as we organize ourselves into more and more complex living constructions, we each find our place and our leadership within it. Within our body, in our lives across time, in our family, in our specific job, in our jobs or positions overseeing others, whatever it is that is given to us and that we are gifted to rule over.

Big or small, vast or focused, we all lead and we all serve. Because at their deepest levels, the difference between them becomes unclear. They become a circle, a spiral of life being constructed out of deadness, order out of chaos. The parts serve one another, and all serve the idea and purpose, the logos of the living entity. The citizens serve and guard the king so the king can serve and guard the citizens, so all can serve and guard the idea and life of the kingdom, so its prospering can serve and guard and grow the lives of the those who make it up. It’s a trinitarian relationship.

And that’s all.