Posted by denised in This week Buck Hamilton’s back with a new post in his Managing the Meanies series. The Formative Years covers, well, his formative years, a period in which he developed his leadership skills, skills that would help him get out of a jam or two…
The formative years
It was during my formative years as a young manager when I surely developed my leadership skills.
Most of the eighteen men and women that I supervised were easily twice my age, union employees who were protected by a negotiated contract. I was young, very inexperienced, and they knew it. It was on this job that I learned how to be persuasive. If I walked around acting like a tyrant I’d never get anywhere with them. Sure there were a few die-hard union incorrigibles who wouldn’t allow themselves to be swayed by my persuasiveness, but for the most part my style worked and frankly it was one of the most fun jobs that I ever had.
Beyond supervising, one of the important functions of that early management position was writing up the papermaking recipes. On one formula I had mistakenly noted the color formulation to be six hundred ounces of liquid red dye, enough of the pigment to color an Olympic size swimming pool crimson. We were scheduled to make gray colored paper that evening and the dye content should have read sixty liquid ounces.
The importance of being fair
One of the guys who worked for me, Stanley, a Polish immigrant who had been orphaned and displaced during the Second World War, called me in the middle of the night to alert me of my mistake. After tripping over the night stand and knocking over the lamp I answered the phone and heard Stanley’s broken English over the din of the paper machinery in the background. He’d been at the job for over thirty years and had instantly picked up my error – before committing to making the paper, I might add – and just wanted to let me know. Given that this was a union shop, and considering that he would have been following my instructions, Stanley could have simply added the incorrect six hundred ounces of red and the resultant disaster would have not only ruined thousands of pounds of paper, not to mention lost productivity and costly paper machine downtime, but would have also derailed my career at a very young start. I had always been fair with all of them and Stanley knew it, so rather than taking me down the road of humiliation and disgrace he chose to do the right thing and corrected the problem. What do you suppose Stanley would have done had I been a tyrant, an abusive martinet that no one could tolerate?
Had Buck been a heel of a boss, Stanley would have left him high and dry. I’ve seen it happen a dozen times, and I have to admit I’ve let a bad boss or two suffer the consequences of their own stupidity just because I could. It wasn’t necessarily the most mature thing to do, but they had it coming. Leadership – true leadership – earns respect, and that respect goes a long way with employees.
Next Tuesday: The one asking the questions is the one in charge
Buck Hamilton is a sales and marketing executive who’s spent over thirty years working in the paper distribution business. He’s a prolific writer who’s presently working on a book which narrates the stories of sixteen Vietnam War veterans. You can read his weekly series “Managing the Meanies: A Survival Guide” every Tuesday here on Really Bad Boss.
