back around afterward. We reached him on his cellphone and told him the news. I said, “Wayne, you really don’t need to come here for a day so that we can fire you. Do you want to stay home and be with your family?”
Wayne responded, “Tony, thank you. I’m going to come to you. This is a difficult time and you and (the COO) may need me to help you through it.”
I’d say I was a bit taken aback by his words. We need him to help us through this!? He was the one being fired. But Wayne didn’t approach it that way. He knew we were anguished to have to do this and his concern was for us. The three of us met the next day and discussed the details. At the end of the termination meeting, Wayne asked us, “Are you fellas okay? I know this is hard on you guys and I want you to know I respect both of you. This doesn’t affect our friendship.” I thought I would be consoling him but it turned out Wayne was comforting me.
Being fired didn’t dim Wayne’s inner light. If anything, it shone more brightly. Wayne became a successful senior manager in a company in Texas, blessed to be able to work in a respectful environment that utilized his talents and to be close to his strong and faithful family, for which he gave thanks.
You and I choose how we live our lives. More properly, we make hundreds of small choices each day that add up to the sum of our lives. In baseball an inch either way means a hit or an out. In football an inch can mean first down or punt. Everything we need to help us make the right choices and go those inches in our journeys successfully, we already possess.
Our most important choice is how we are going to use all of the best within us to achieve and sustain success.
Lesson:
“There is a destiny that makes us sisters and brothers. None of us goes his way alone. All that we send into the lives of others comes back into our own.” Alicia Appleman-Jurman, Holocaust survivor and author of Alicia, My Story
Chapter Two
“What I’m saying is . . .”
The journey begins with people.
No matter what the topic of discussion, no matter what is being debated, analyzed, preached or legislated, the starting point is people. As a manager, your first duty is to manage people.
Your highest duty as a manager is to lead people.
This first duty has a number of assigned tasks – to listen, to teach, to understand, to monitor, to correct, to develop, to approve, to build a team. There are several good and profitable reasons why you accept this duty and perform these tasks – it’s the job for which you are paid, it’s your profession in which you take pride, you enjoy getting the job done right, your success and your team’s success help grow the organization. And there is something inside of you that says being the leader of a successful group of people is satisfying and challenging, like being the head of a family.
You have one enormous advantage in leading the people on your team. You are a human being too. Although the blur of business (“Did we get that freight out to JFK yet???”) may obscure this simple fact, you share all the same sets of emotions, needs, fears, and desires as your people. You may not show it at work but you laugh, cry and have doubts in the same natural ways that they do. And your basic needs for self-preservation, respect, recognition, discipline, nourishment, comfort and the rest are the same also.
These facts are so elemental that they probably seem simplistic as you read them.
Are they?
When did you last consider the straightforward humanity you share with everyone with whom you work everyday? When you look at the people on your team, do you see the individuals or do you see what you think of each of them? What do they see looking at you – the manager who knows, listens and cares about each of them or the face of someone who comes to work with the ultimate goal of leaving it behind as quickly as possible?
The one thing that happens every workday is you enter and leave your workplace as an individual person, a human being, no matter what else occurs in the intervening time. The same happens to everyone around you. Is your goal to be as successful a human being as you can be at work every day?
Let’s Talk About That
For over thirty-five years I have been studying people at work, including studying my own behavior. Although my resume shows that I’ve held a number of different positions, Urban Planner, Management Analyst, Corruption Investigator, Deputy Mayor, Human Resources Vice President, and Human Resources Consultant, what all these positions have in common is my observing, listening, analyzing and reflecting on the subject of how and why do people behave at work.
During college, I worked as a maintenance person and administrative assistant for a real estate firm in Brooklyn Heights, NY. My boss was Ken Boss. That was his name, no fooling! He would say with a smile, “I was born to be a boss.”
He was an attorney, a real estate investor, a collector of everything, an artist, a writer, a candidate for public office, a gadfly, a political activist, a landlord, and a surrogate uncle to me. In short, he was an amazing, confusing, dynamic bundle of human energy. Yes, I never knew anyone like him, before or since. He had all the money he would ever need, and then some, but if he saw a toaster on top of a garbage can, he would take it. “If you saw a five-dollar bill on the ground,” he asked me, “would you take it?” Of course. “Well this toaster isn’t broken, the person just doesn’t want it anymore and it’s worth at least five-dollars!”
Oh, he had a rule about collecting. “I don’t pick garbage. I only take what’s on top!”
Don’t laugh, he found the original printer’s galleys for a book by a well known author who lived in the neighborhood, with the author’s handwritten corrections and comments. I think that piece eventually brought a tidy sum at auction. The Boss home, a magnificent brownstone on one of the finest streets in Brooklyn Heights, had a TV in every room except the baths. I don’t think Ken bought any of those sets.
He either used or gave to others, including many of his tenants, the refurbished toasters and TV sets and other disjecta he collected. He was a self-proclaimed, card-carrying Socialist. He didn’t do too shabbily as a capitalist, either.
I painted apartments, cleaned hallways and fixed minor leaks in his buildings during my last 18 months of college. Upon graduation from college, I worked in his office.
Thus began my career of studying people. You learn a lot by listening to tenants complain to their landlord. I learned a lot by watching Ken hold the phone away from his ear while one more tenant confirmed that the discoloration in the porcelain of his toilet bowl required the installation of a whole new one. Every two minutes or so Ken would put the receiver back to his ear and say, “I see.”
Well, he didn’t see; he was on the phone. And he didn’t seem to hear because he didn’t seem to be listening. And he didn’t seem to want to hear. But when the call was concluded, I was dispatched to carefully paint over the discoloration and make another tenant satisfied.
Okay, maybe this wasn’t the height of customer service but in its way it worked. The tenant had a chance to vent without being interrupted. Once Ken knew what the tenant wanted, a suitable, cost-effective solution was devised and implemented. The tenant saw a response that usually was more than acceptable.
The Big Lessons
One of the most important elements in dealing with people successfully, if not the most important element, is Listening. So the next time someone at work states, “What I’m saying is . . .” you should be able to respond honestly, “I hear you. I know what you’re saying. I’m listening to you.”
This book has two starting points in my life, both of which intimately involved my ability to listen.
The