As it’s been said many times before, leadership is a privilege, an honor. This statement should not be taken lightly or overlooked as I think it has been said so much it may have become a bit watered down. Look at it this way, if you as a leader could do all the work yourself, you wouldn’t need a team, and therefore, you wouldn’t be a leader. This means you live and die by your team; or put another way, success and failure come from your team, not by you as a leader.
Putting your team first, especially when you are in the middle of a big organization, is not an easy thing to do. Organizations have people in different roles, each role having the best intentions to do the right thing for the company. However, these things can sometimes hinder productivity, and sometimes even lower morale.
I have seen this personally when finance and business leaders do not work well together. Finance has a very important role to play in that it needs to understand the financial performance of the business and communicate to the business leaders options to ensure the financial success of the business. However, it can become quite dangerous when the financial role oversteps a bit due to a lack of clarity in roles and communication amongst the leadership.
This can cause an organization to shift from a customer and people-first focus to a numbers-driven organization. So much senior leadership time had been spent on setting targets and then understanding whether or not the business was meeting those targets. The senior leadership then reacted sharply to perceived realities based on information that may or may not have been accurate against relatively arbitrary goals that didn’t mean much. This management churn shifted the senior leadership focus and consequently, management and supervisors started to focus solely on numbers, and less on customers and people.
That was a complex summary so let me give a real-world example: work-related travel.
I had been working to develop new and exciting opportunities in France. This new work was strategically important to the long term growth of the company as well as to secure in-year targets. As the delivery team works for a separate organization, in the U.S., I negotiated with the delivery leadership to send their best and brightest individual to France to kick-off the technical portion of the work.
As it happened, I had been traveling back to France on the same flight as this young, eager, star employee. I met her in an airport bar and then invited her to accompany me to the airline lounge (as I had accumulated many miles in the air, I received certain airline perks that almost make it humane to travel). This was my first encounter with this relatively new employee, and I imagine she was a bit nervous or hesitant to want to spend her travel time with someone higher up in the organization, but I tried to remain social. She was, after all, giving up her family Sunday time to travel to France and going straight to work Monday afternoon.
In any event, she impressed me quickly with her knowledge and excitement to do a good job on this new work we were about to embark on. I normally do not give praise too quickly, but she really did impress me. I then come to find out, that the supervisor she works for had her book the most basic of airline tickets; one in which you could not even select your seat. This was because the young supervisor was being squeezed by the finance group’s rules of a focus purely on the numbers and to save as much as possible. He felt trapped and would not allow her to book anything but this type of ticket.
When I found this out, I walked her up to the airline lounge customer service desk and asked how much it would be to change her seat to something that’s not in the last row in the middle on a 10+ hour international, overnight flight. I needed this sharp employee to perform well in front of this important new customer and I know from personal experience the toll that travel fatigue and jet lag can have on someone not used to it.
At the end of the day, this was my project, and I had the overall responsibility for its profit and loss. When the airline customer service representative informed us that it would be a mere $300 to change her seat to economy plus and a window seat, I quickly jumped on the opportunity. Doing what she thought was the right thing, the sharp technical expert said to me, “This is out of policy and my supervisor will not approve this expense, I can’t spend this money”.
To cut the story short, I paid for the seat change and expensed it myself, as this $300 would not make or break the entire project. What would make or break the entire project, would be a poor technical kickoff in front of a very technical customer who had high expectations.
This small demonstration to the young employee, an act that showed her someone cared for her personally, went a long way. She wound up going above and beyond what was asked of her in front of the customer and the project kick-off was a huge success.
The moral here is to always put people first, they will appreciate it and they will want to perform well for you. Granted, the project kick-off was not a success solely due to this one act. She would have performed well regardless of how she got there as I feel it was in her nature. However, this small gesture from a leader in her organization made her feel that someone cared about her well being, and she was willing to do more for the project.
We must recognize that it’s not about whether or not the project makes its profit goal by $300 less, but rather the project was a success, the customer was happy, and the employee performed at her best and will continue to want to perform at her best in the future. When you put your people first, good work will come of it, which will then lead to future work and future customers. I implore the middle managers and supervisors in organizations to understand this, as it will do more for your success than making an extra $300 on a project.
