5 Beneath Effective Leadership

“After 10 years at the law firm, I left to become general counsel of Sierra Product Systems. Do you remember Sierra?” Bud asked.

Sierra had pioneered several of the processes that Zagrum had exploited to climb to its place at the top of the high-tech manufacturing heap. “You bet,” I said. “Their technologies changed the industry. Whatever happened to them?”

“They were acquired — by Zagrum Company.”

“Really? I never heard that.”

“The deal was sort of complicated. But the long and short of it is that Zagrum acquired most of Sierra’s useful intellectual property — patents and so on.

“That was 16 years ago. At the time, I was COO of Sierra and came to Zagrum as part of the deal. I had no idea what I was getting into.” Bud reached for his glass and took a drink. “At the time, Zagrum was a bit of a mystery. But I was introduced to the mystery of Zagrum in a hurry — in my second major meeting, to be exact.

“Being intimately familiar with the key acquisitions from Sierra, I joined Zagrum as part of the executive team. In my first meeting, I was given several difficult assignments to complete before the next meeting in two weeks. It was a heavy load, learning the business and all.

“At last, on the night before the next meeting, there was only one assignment that I’d yet to complete. It was late, and I was tired. Given all I’d accomplished and been through to do it, this one remaining assignment seemed inconsequential. So I let it go.

“At the meeting the next day, I reported my achievements, made recommendations, and shared the important information I had gathered. Then I told the group that because all my time had been taken up with these other assignments, not to mention all the obstacles I’d encountered, there was one assignment I hadn’t yet completed.

“I’ll never forget what happened next. Lou Herbert, who was then president of the company, turned to Kate Stenarude, who at the time occupied the position I have now, and asked her to take that assignment for the next meeting. The meeting then continued with others’ reports. Nothing more was made of it, but I noticed that I was the only person in the group who had left something undone.

“I spent the rest of the meeting lost in my own thoughts — feeling embarrassed, feeling small, wondering if I belonged, wondering if I wanted to belong.

“The meeting closed, and I packed my documents into my briefcase as others chatted. I didn’t feel part of the group at that moment and was quietly slipping past some of my bantering colleagues toward the door, when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“I turned and saw Lou smiling, gazing at me with his gentle yet penetrating eyes. He asked if I’d mind if he walked with me back to my office. To my surprise after what he had just done to me in the meeting, I replied that I didn’t.”

Bud paused for a moment, pulling himself from the memory. “You don’t know Lou, Tom, and probably haven’t been here long enough to know the stories, but Lou Herbert is a legend. He was personally responsible for taking a mediocre, inconsequential company and making it into a juggernaut — sometimes in spite of, and sometimes even because of, his weaknesses. Everyone who worked at Zagrum during his era was fiercely loyal to him.”

“I’ve heard a few stories, actually,” I said. “And I remember from my work at Tetrix how even the top folks there seemed to admire him — Joe Alvarez in particular, the Tetrix CEO, who considered Lou the pioneer of the industry.”

“He’s right,” Bud agreed. “Lou was the industry pioneer. But Joe doesn’t know the extent of his pioneering. That’s what you’re going to learn,” he emphasized. “Lou’s been retired for 10 years now, but he still comes around a few times a month to see how we’re doing. His insight is invaluable. We still keep an office for him.

“Anyway, I knew much of his legend before I joined the company. So perhaps you can understand my warring emotions after the meeting I just described. I felt that I’d been slighted, but I was also supremely worried about Lou’s opinion of me. And then he asked if he could walk me to my office! I was glad to have him walk with me but also afraid — of what, though, I didn’t know.

“He asked me how my move had been, whether my family was settled and happy, and how I was enjoying the challenges at Zagrum. He was saddened to hear that Nancy was having a hard time with the move and promised to call her personally to see if there was anything he could do — a call he placed that very night.

“When we arrived at my office, before I could turn to go in, he took me by both shoulders with his strong, lean hands. He looked straight into my eyes, a look of gentle concern written in the lines across his weathered face. ‘Bud,’ he said, ‘we’re happy to have you with us. You’re a talented man and a good man. You add a lot to the team. But you won’t ever let us down again, will you?’ ”

“He said that?” I asked incredulously.

“Yes.”

“Nothing against Lou,” I said, “but I think that was a little uncalled for, given all you’d done. You can scare away a lot of people saying things like that.”

“That’s true,” Bud agreed. “But you know something? It didn’t happen that way for me. With Lou, in that moment, I wasn’t offended. And in a way, I was even inspired. I found myself saying, ‘No, Lou. I won’t. I won’t ever let you down again.’

“Now I know that sounds corny. But that’s the way it was with Lou. He very rarely did things by the book. If 100 people had tried to do what Lou did to me in that meeting and afterward, only 1 in 100 could have invited my cooperation, as Lou did, rather than my resentment. By the book, it shouldn’t have worked. But it worked anyway. And with Lou, it usually did. The question, Tom, is why — why did it work?”

That was a good question. “I don’t know,” I finally said, shrugging my shoulders. Then, almost as an afterthought, I said, “Maybe you just knew that Lou cared about you, so you didn’t feel as threatened as you might have otherwise.”

Bud smiled and sat down again in the seat across from me. “So you think I could tell that — how Lou was feeling about me.”

“Yeah, I think you probably could.”

“And so you’re saying, then, Tom, that I was primarily responding to how Lou was regarding me — at least to how I thought he was regarding me — and that his regard, to me, was more important than merely his words or his actions. Is that what you’re suggesting?”

I pondered the question for a moment, thinking about the things I cared about in my interactions with others. I did pay attention to how I thought others were seeing me — what my wife, Laura, was thinking about me, for example, or whether I thought she was just thinking of herself. My responses to her and to others always seemed to be informed by what I thought they were thinking of me. “Yes, I guess I am suggesting that,” I agreed. “If I feel like someone is just thinking of himself, I usually discount everything he says.”

Bud nodded. “We had a good example of that here a couple of years ago. Two people over in Building 6 were having a hard time working together. One of them, Gabe, came to me to talk about it and said, ‘I don’t know what to do here. I can’t get Leon to respond and cooperate with me. It doesn’t matter what I do; Leon doesn’t seem to think that I have any interest in him. I go out of my way to ask about his family, I invite him to lunch, I’ve done everything I can think of doing, but nothing helps.’

“ ‘I want you to consider something, Gabe,’ I said to him. ‘Really think about it. When you’re going out of your way to do all those things for Leon so that he’ll know you have an interest in him, what are you most interested in— him or his opinion of you?’

“I think Gabe was a little surprised by the question. ‘Perhaps Leon thinks you’re not really interested in him,’ I continued, ‘because you’re really more interested in yourself.’

“Gabe finally understood the problem, but it was a painful moment. It was up to him, then, to figure out what to do about it, applying some of the things that you and I are going to cover today — things, by the way, that apply as much to our relationships at home as they do to our relationships at work. Let me give you an example of that, closer to home.”

Bud smiled at me. “You’ve probably never had an argument with your wife, now, have you?”

I burst out in a too-eager laugh. “Just a couple.”

“Well, my wife, Nancy, and I were in the middle of one of those a number of years back. It was the morning, before work. As I recall, she was upset that I hadn’t cleaned the dishes the night before, and I was upset that she was so upset about it. Do you get the picture?”

“Oh yeah, I’ve been there,” I said, thinking of the latest in the long line of tiffs I’d had with Laura that very morning.

“After a while, Nancy and I had actually worked our ways to opposite sides of the room,” Bud continued. “I was tiring of our little ‘discussion,’ which was making me late for work, and decided to apologize and put an end to it. I walked over to her and said, ‘I’m sorry, Nancy,’ and bent down to kiss her.

“Our lips met, if at all, only for a millisecond. It was the world’s shortest kiss. I didn’t intend it that way, but it was all either of us could muster.

“ ‘You don’t mean it,’ she said quietly, as I backed slowly away. And she was right, of course — for just the reason we’ve been talking about. The way I really felt came through. I felt wronged, burdened, and unappreciated, and I couldn’t cover it up — even with a kiss. But I remember wandering down the hall toward the garage, shaking my head and muttering to myself. Now I had more evidence of my wife’s unreasonableness — she couldn’t even accept an apology!

“But here’s the point, Tom: Was there an apology to accept?”

“No, because you didn’t really mean it, just like Nancy said.”

“That’s right. My words said, ‘I’m sorry,’ but my feelings didn’t, and it was the way I was feeling — revealed as it was through my voice, my gaze, my posture, my level of interest in her needs, and so on—it was that that she was responding to.”

Bud paused, and I thought of that morning with Laura: her face, a face that once radiated energy, concern, and love for life, now obscured by resignation to a deep hurt, her words tearing holes in whatever convictions I still held for our marriage. “I don’t feel like I know you anymore, Tom,” she had said. “And what’s worse, I get the feeling most of the time that you don’t really care to know me. It’s like I weigh you down or something. I don’t know the last time I felt love from you. It’s all coldness now. You just bury yourself in your work — even when you’re home. And to be honest, I don’t really have strong feelings for you, either. I wish I did, but everything is just kind of blah. Our life together isn’t really together at all. We just live our lives separately while living in the same house, passing each other every now and then, inquiring about calendars and common events. We even manage to smile, but it’s all lies. There’s no feeling behind it.”

“As you suggested, Tom,” I heard Bud say, calling me back from my troubles, “we often can sense how others are feeling toward us, can’t we? Given a little time, we can always tell when we’re being coped with, manipulated, or outsmarted. We can always detect the hypocrisy. We can always feel the blame concealed beneath veneers of niceness. And we typically resent it. In the workplace, for example, it won’t matter if the other person tries managing by walking around, sitting on the edge of the chair to practice active listening, inquiring about family members in order to show interest, or using any other skill learned in order to be more effective. What we’ll know and respond to is how that person is regarding us when doing those things.”

My thoughts turned to Chuck Staehli again. “Yeah, I know what you’re talking about,” I said. “Do you know Chuck Staehli, the COO over at Tetrix?”

“About six-foot-four, thinning reddish hair, narrow intense eyes?” asked Bud.

“That’s him. Well, it took me about 10 minutes with him to know that he felt the world revolved around him — and if the world, then certainly everyone in his organization. I remember, for example, being on a conference call with Joe Alvarez after a hectic October spent fixing a bug in one of our products. It was a Herculean effort that consumed nearly all of my time and 80 percent of the time of one of my groups. On the call, Joe offered congratulations for a job well done. Guess who accepted all the praise?”

“Staehli?”

“Yes, Staehli. He barely acknowledged us — and it was in such an undervalued way that it was worse than if he hadn’t. He just lapped it all up and basked in the glory. I think in that moment he really thought he was responsible. It made me sick, quite frankly. And that’s just one of many examples.”

Bud was listening with interest, and suddenly I became aware of what I was doing — criticizing my old boss in front of my new one. I felt that I should shut up. Immediately. “Anyway, it just seemed that Chuck was a good example of what you’re talking about.” I sat back in my chair to signal that I was done, hoping that I hadn’t said too much.

If Bud was alarmed by anything, he didn’t show it. “Yeah, that’s a good example,” he said. “Now compare Staehli with Lou. Or, more precisely, compare the influence that each of them had on others. Would you say, for example, that Staehli inspired in you the same kind of effort, the same level of results, as Lou inspired in me?”

That was easy. “No way,” I said. “Staehli didn’t inspire hard work or devotion at all. Don’t get me wrong. I worked hard anyway because I had a career of my own to worry about. But no one ever went out of their way to help him.”

“Notice that some people — like Lou, for example — inspire devotion and commitment in others, even when they’re interpersonally clumsy,” said Bud. “The fact that they haven’t attended many seminars or that they’ve never learned the latest techniques hardly matters. They seem to produce anyway. And they inspire those around them to do the same. Some of the best leaders in our company fall in this category. They don’t always say or do the ‘right’ things, but people love working with them. They get results.

“But then there are other people — like Chuck Staehli, as you described him — who have a very different influence. Even if they do all the ‘right’ things interpersonally — even if they apply all the latest skills and techniques to their communications and tasks—it won’t matter. People ultimately resent them and their tactics. And so they end up failing as leaders — failing because they provoke people to resist them.”

Everything Bud was saying seemed true when applied to Chuck Staehli, but I wondered whether he was going too far. “I get what you’re saying,” I said, “I think I even agree with it, but are you suggesting that people skills don’t matter at all? I’m not sure that’s right.”

“No. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that. But I am suggesting that people skills are never primary. In my experience, they can be valuable when used by people like Lou — they can reduce misunderstandings and clumsiness. But they’re not so helpful when used by people like Staehli, as you described him, for they just create resentment in the people one is trying to ‘skill’ or ‘smooth’ into doing something. Whether or not people skills are effective depends on something deeper.”

“Something deeper?”

“Yes, deeper than behavior and skill. That’s what Lou — and my reaction to him — taught me the day of that second meeting here at Zagrum. And what he taught me at the beginning of the very next day when he and I met for a daylong meeting.”

“You mean—?”

“Yes, Tom,” Bud answered, before I had voiced the question. “Lou did for me what I’m now beginning to do for you. They used to be called ‘Lou Meetings,’ ” he added with a grin and a knowing look.

“Remember, I have the same problem that you have.”