What pisses me off about the World Series

I am a big soccer (real football) fan, as all my friends know, but for some reason I enjoy baseball. Maybe it’s the tactics, the skill involved, and of course the tension of the playoffs. I would love to watch the World Series.

However, on the east coast the games don’t start until 8pm, and the damn things go until midnight, at the earliest. This pisses me off and so I don’t ever turn them on, not even for an hour, because it would just piss me off even further to turn it off at 10pm (or even 11pm, if I was ambitious) and miss the end of the game.

I hate it. I wonder how many other potential viewers they lose – certainly most (east coast) children, who could be getting excited about baseball.

At a certain point, it’s about the people

I like working. There are things about working that appeal to me more than other aspects of working but overall I like the satisfaction and feeling of self-worth that working provides me. Is it about getting paid well for the work? Sort of, but not really. Getting paid well is important at points in one’s career, as we can’t live the life we want to live without the resources to fund that lifestyle. Many people don’t enjoy the peace of mind that comes with financial security, and therefore, the money is a very high priority.

I am not embarrassed that I have financial security but I do think it’s important to remember that I am part of a very lucky minority.

At this point in my career – and given the financial security that I enjoy – what I do next involves different variables than just “how much will I get paid.” In fact the most important thing is the people I work with. I want to work with people that I respect, enjoy, learn from and can contribute to. I love being part of a team. I love leading teams and being part of a team built on trust. I have made some bad decisions and ended up at firms where the teamwork was not ‘encouraging’ and I didn’t last.

My last company (a small software company called Aternity) was a great experience – my colleagues and the CEO who recruited me were all capable, energetic, committed, and great team mates. Sadly the company was taken over or I’d still be there.

At this point in my career – and I do still like working – my priority is to work with the right people.

But that’s just me.

What’s a good guy, anyway?

As a leader, I am often asking managers who report to me to assess their people. Quite often, the first words are something like “he’s a good guy.” I am ignoring the fact that many of them are women of course, just for the sake of illustration.

What does “he’s a good guy” mean, anyway? nothing.

When someone says that “he’s a good guy” it tells me very little. Maybe it means that he’s a nice person? Maybe it means that he is loyal and that this manager likes working with him? Mostly it tells me that the manager is unwilling or unable to tell me more clearly how to evaluate this employee’s performance. It usually leads to me asking why this “good guy” is not making his numbers, or not making an impact in some measurable way. It then descends into “he’s a good guy, but…”

When someone asks me to assess someone on my team, I try very hard NOT to say “he’s a good guy.” I try to answer with some clear points of description, such as “he has an excellent track record of knowing his numbers,” or “he’s the most responsive person on the team,” or “he’s a strong sales leader, but doesn’t have enough experience at people management yet, but is highly coachable so is worth the investment of time.”

Comments like the last one tell the listener something more useful about this employee than “he’s a good guy.”

So how come when people say “he’s a good guy,” the answer is often “yeah, i’ve heard that about him?” So meaningless – neither party to the conversation has learned anything from that exchange!

Okay I guess that was not much more than a pet peeve, but you get what I mean? I’m a good guy, after all.

Straight Talk

It amazes me how difficult this. Let’s think about what ‘straight talk’ is and is not.

Straight talk is when someone offers honest and direct, but polite and respectful insight and feedback. It can be offered by a boss, an employee, a colleague, a partner, a parent, a coach, anyone really… It is not just critical feedback and it is not just ‘happy talk’ though straight talk can be both critical and positive. Let’s consider some examples from the working world.

A manager has a responsibility to provide feedback to employees, and to do it on a regular basis – not just during annual appraisal time. Critical feedback is best offered privately, not during a meeting with other colleagues present. Positive feedback should also be carefully considered before providing in a meeting format as it can inspire comparisons and jealousy unless it is part of planned public recognition. If your employee inspires the need for critical feedback, try to provide it swiftly after the meeting. “Lee, I’d like to suggest you are talking too much during the meeting. It dampens the spirits of others and discourages them from participating. Look for hints from me in the future when I see it.”

This is simple and direct. More complex and difficult is when a manager needs to tell an employee that he/she is simply not up for the role he’s in. This is no fun, and even more difficult if it’s not the employee’s fault. Perhaps a previous manager made the wrong decision or perhaps the employee isn’t sufficiently self-aware to recognize that she is not well suited for this particular role. The manager does no one any favors by avoiding this discussion. The employee will continue to struggle in the ‘wrong’ role, the manager will bear the blame for this as it carries on, and other employees will resent both the underperforming employee and the manager who is reluctant to solve the problem. The employee may or may not take the feedback easily but it doesn’t make it less appropriate to take action and most employees will look back on the situation with the perspective of time and distance and realize that the manager did him a favor.

Employees also need to consider how to provide straight talk, to each other and to bosses. I recently took a valued colleague aside after he made a presentation to a large group. This colleague is excellent in so many ways, and he is a peer of mine. Nonetheless his presentation was not good. He spoke way to fast and with his european accent it was difficult for people to follow him. His knowledge and expertise was lost on the group as he spoke faster and faster and was clearly uncomfortable in front of the room. I took him aside after and said that as we are friends now I hope he didn’t mind if I offered him some feedback. I told him he needs to slow down, take a breath and we discussed it for a few minutes. As a mature colleague he expressed appreciation for the feedback and recognized it as accurate. I hope I did him a favor by calling it to his attention so he can practice his public speaking in the future.

It’s important when assessing whether you can provide such feedback to a boss to assess whether he/she takes feedback. If your boss isn’t a good listener or doesn’t like feedback then this can be dangerous. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, but you may need to recognize the inherent risks. For me, if I have a boss who doesn’t like feedback (I call those bosses “smartest guy in the room” types) then I’d rather know that, as I won’t enjoy being part of that team. If you assess that the boss trusts his team well enough to accept feedback then you owe it to him/her to offer it. You might couch it as an offer to help (“perhaps I can help you with your communications in the future, if you’d like”). No boss (or employee, or colleague) commands every skill with equal levels of accomplishment. I have had a boss who is very smart, strategic and a good listener, but he’s not the best speaker or writer. We can help him, as these skills are important….if he accepts the help.

Oh yeah, and I need to remind myself regularly to seek feedback and let me people (colleagues, employees, bosses) know that I welcome it. It makes me a better executive.

One doesn’t have to be born in a place to have roots there

That is a line from Rachel Field, an author who fell in love with Sutton Island, in the Cranberry Islands of Downeast Maine. She didn’t grow up there, but her heart found its home there.

I feel that way about Deer Isle. I discovered it as a little boy, when my parents decided that their usual summer getaways (Cape Cod, etc) were getting just a little too crowded. Well there were no crowds this far up. We stayed that first summer at a gorgeous place called the Eggemoggin Inn. That was it. They booked different rental places for a couple of weeks at a time each summer, until they finally decided to buy. They bought some land on the water and built a house and retired to it. Mom and Dad lived year round in Stonington, Maine for about 14 years until Dad ‘s Alzheimer’s suggested the need for more health care and we moved them off the island. It was one of the saddest days of my life and I will never forget driving him out.

Stonington is a little fishing village.

Lobstermen live here. In the summer it attracts artists and some tourists, but this is not like southern maine. We don’t have beaches and tourist attractions. It is classic ‘real Maine’ with a rocky coast, an archipelago of over 70 islands and some of the most beautiful scenery you will ever see. The people are warm and straight forward. We will always be from ‘away’ and we know that, but it’s still a place where we feel we have roots.

My kids are now 3rd generation with ‘roots’ in Stonington and Deer Isle. We have since built our own house, on a wonderful cove on the ocean, and my kids love to visit which pleases me to no end. My youngest even started a kayaking business here.

Rachel was right – you don’t have to have been born in a place to feel like you have roots. This is where I feel good about life.

Sales is both a science and an art

This might sound odd – how can something be both science and art? My many years of selling and sales leadership tell me that both are important, however.

Cultivating relationships, developing compelling proposals and presentations, these things are artful. Some people are just wonderful at developing relationships and earning trust from customers and clients. Their personality shines through during interactions and the old saw of “people buy from people” is not entirely wrong.

However, the science of sales calls upon process and data. This is true for the sales manager but also for the sales person. A good salesperson is excellent at relationships. An excellent salesperson is also excellent at managing the territory, understanding where he/she is in the sales cycle, using the tools at hand (CRM system etc.)

The sales manager relies on this data. The sales manager needs to understand yield (how many deals actually close from the pipeline), coverage (how many deals do we NEED in order to make target given expected yield), velocity (how fast do our deals of a certain size close) and all the varieties of the above in different geographies and territories.

Sales is a science…and an art. That’s what makes it so much fun!

Sales Leadership – Ambiguity

I thought I would try to write a bit about the things I know professionally. I have been writing about personal issues, i.e. family, politics, some things I care about as a person. I do, however, have a professional life. I have grown over the years and learned what I am good at what I am less good at. I like leading teams of people, and believe I am good at it. I particularly like leading global teams, but let’s leave that for another session.

One thing it is vital to recognize as a leader – especially as a sales leader – is that you have to be comfortable with ambiguity. This is extraordinarily hard to learn, and experience is often the best teacher.

However, decisions that are put off, delayed, or made without confidence because we only have a portion of the information needed for certainty are deadly. I have watched executives delay, take too much time, hesitate and ultimately make a decision after others have lost faith in his/her ability to be decisive. This hurts everyone else’s confidence. Decisions are made with as much information as possible, but eventually there is a tradeoff between decisiveness and full information and decisions need to be made.

Take a personnel decision, for example. We can do research on a candidate’s background, we can evaluate past performance, but eventually we have to decide to hire or not hire…or we lost the candidate. Of course the converse is also true – tolerating a poor performer for too long sucks the life out of the rest of the organization.

Yes, one must eventually trust one’s gut, as they say. Making decisions in an environment of ambiguity is a sign of leadership. It’s a bit of “no, i’m not 100% sure we can take that mountain, but I am confident we can do it if we do it together. Who’s with me?”

People want leaders. Leaders need people to follow. Don’t hesitate to lead. Someone has to do it – it might as well be you 🙂

Confessions of a Liberal

There. I said it.

For years, I denied that I was liberal. I hated the tag. I claimed to be agnostic when it came to politics. I said that I was registered Independent (true) and that I just looked for the best candidate. I also claimed to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal…my slippery slope, but also true.

Somehow, in recent years, it has dawned on me that I have either migrated left or simply found the right more and more distasteful. That bears some ‘splanation though, as I have many friends who are conservative (doesn’t everyone say that?) and I love them, and respect them. In fact, even while I am prepared to embrace the ‘liberal’ tag, I do still agree with some conservative precepts, some of which have to do with international policy and some with regards to domestic fiscal policy.

What has spurred me to look in the liberal mirror is a combination of things. Trumpism is certainly one of them, but more than that I find the fact that conservatives/Republicans’ interest in following Trump – even as he has faded from sight – to be disappointing. I don’t know what happened to the Republican party of Reagan, or even the Bushes! They seem to make every decision based on how to turn back the legacy of Barack Obama.

I have to admit that the Democrats are a noisy, disorganized lot who do a lot of whining and finger-pointing. Not sure I identify with them, but that’s different from just being liberal.

My confession comes from my realization that my belief in social structures to support poor people, globalization of economies and the world in general, protection of the environment, protection for gays, #blm, climate control, vaccination (duh)…all of those things that I believe in seem to make it clear that I am a liberal in this day and age. I don’t particularly care for labels, but I guess I am one.

So there. phew.

Father’s Day

Most of me thinks of this as a silly holiday, invented by Hallmark and the other companies that just want to sell cards and gifts. I don’t need a holiday to remind me that I’m a Father.

But then I hear from my kids…and I remember that I’m not just a father. Anybody can be a father, but I’m a Dad, and a Daddy. That’s different.

I have had a lot of jobs in my 40 years of working, since I got out of college in 1981. Most of them – probably all of them – have been rewarding to a large extent, even the ones that ended poorly (never my fault, of course). The one job I have had for 32+ years now is being a Dad. It is the best job I ever had. I think back on those 32 years and I know there were some tough times (ever had teenagers?) but all I really remember is the wonderful times. And – thanks largely to my ‘never give up’ wife, they all turned out well. Not just well, but actually great, on every level. They are all industrious and hard-working (from marketing to banking to medicine to entrepreneurship) but that’s just the tip of it, the indicator that they turned out well as humans. They all grew up wiser than I was at their age, more worldly and better global citizens. Some of that is due to the advantages we gave them – living and traveling around the world is not something everyone is lucky enough to be exposed to at a young age. But a lot of it is values. They care about the right things – some of those things are human rights, #blm, and the human condition…but again you have to scratch below the surface to see where it all comes from. They care about other people, not just themselves.

Every once in a while one of my kids will accuse another of being selfish. But you know what? It hardly ever happened, and that’s because none of them are actually very selfish. They try hard to see the world through others’ eyes, to recognize their own built-in biases and overcome them. That is truly great stuff, and it’s about values. I wish I could say that their mother and I taught them all that – and of course we do give ourselves credit for establishing that foundation when they were young enough to sit on my lap or ride on my shoulders – but they developed on their own. They developed at their own pace, in different directions in some ways, but always stayed together.

That’s one thing I am more thankful for than anything else as I pause to think about father’s day. We are all still together. We are still a family. We still love each other. We go out of our way to hang out – and that’s hard work now with them living and traveling all over the world.

They will all be here in Maine for July 4th, 2021. I can’t wait. As I look at them, watch them interact, share a beer with them and build a fire in the firepit, I will think just how goddamn lucky I am to be a dad.