Some Kinds of Help

Susan

If you’ve read since the beginning, you know that while this isn’t a biography, I’m using my own timeline and people I’ve met to tell the story of Competence. I stepped off the side of my timeline a bit for my martial arts people. I’ve trained for a long while. It made the most sense to me to gather Competence traits I see frequently in martial artists into a set of their own and talk about them in a series, regardless of when I met the people. But now I’ll get more concrete again, and step back where I left off, introducing you to people I’ve mostly met through work.

I’m not writing this precisely as a business text. It’s partly that, and if you have a strong interest in using it that way, consider subscribing. I’ve got some “how to” type articles for subscribers, and plan to write more over time. 

Rather though, this work is a way to express something I’ve observed my whole life. I want to shine a light on a type of person who lifts heavy weight. Punches above their weight class. Wherever they are. Home, work, family, church, volunteering, community and civic life, these are the ones doing 80% in the 80:20 rule.

I look around and see a range of people with some or all of these traits we’re discussing, and I see possibility. I see a wealth of human potential. Too often we bury these folks. They burn out. Or they decline to “live up to their potential” because they’re too smart to live the wretched life of a truly effective leader. 

Watching the Competent folks I’ve met, trying to unravel how they got that way, how they make choices, learning about them, my strongest conclusion is that the world could be better if we had more like them. If we gave the ones we have more latitude and support to do things well, the up-side would be enormous.

Often though, Competent people avoid attention. Because they’re smart and savvy, they’re good at avoiding attention if they want to. People responsible for so much work can be weirdly invisible (but still “go-to” known) in an organization. They may do important work, but slide out of your awareness. The go-to person who can figure out thorny problems or find a path through the stubbornest challenges. But they’re usually not the executives in charge of it all. 

So today, I’m going to talk with you about what happens when they are in charge. 

When we left off, I was working for the public television network where I stayed for about fourteen years. I learned lessons about Competence there from impressive people you’ve read about (if you started at the beginning). If I was writing a diatribe on “what Competence doesn’t look like,” I would tell you more about why I left. But following one lesson of Competence, to be effective I’m describing what it does look like, not what it doesn’t. Looking at why things are bad teaches less than seeing what makes things better. After fourteen exhausting years, I’d done my best in that job, and it was time to go. 

I did learn not to stay in a bad situation. I hope never to repeat that mistake. When you work in a bizarro-world where a not great leader creates reality it’s akin to living in an abusive relationship. When I left, I was a bit adrift. I’d created an identity around being a CIO, having employees, being a “good manager.” I didn’t leave for something else, I just left. I had not much identity to fall back on.

For a couple of years I pursued work I believed in, recovering. I dived into teaching martial arts. I did some freelancing, writing SOP manuals for new restaurants getting ready to franchise. I volunteered with Legal Aid and other places. I did pre-audit regulatory compliance review for a friend’s company. I even worked at a new donut shop started by an acquaintance. My favorite jobs have always been in customer service. What’s better than making people happy with donuts? I made martial arts jewelry under my own trademark “Weapons Grade Jewelry.” It was a chance to shed “job as identity.” If you have the chance, I highly recommend that. Having an understanding partner helps.

Eventually though, I fell into something long-term. My spouse was having lunch with his group from work and their CIO. The CIO mentioned needing help with some policy work. It’s easy to do policy badly, and theirs had been left a bit of a mess. My spouse ratted me out as available for contracts. I figured it would be just three or four months. I’m usually a good project manager, but estimating has never been my best skill. What was needed was less “write some better policies” and more “help rebuild a whole lot of bridges.” Eight years later and I’m still there, in a permanent role.

(For not-a-biography, that’s a lot. But it’s background to introduce you to the people I met next.)

As I said earlier, most of the Competent people I’ve met have been deep in the woodwork of an organization, not in charge. Enter Susan. Deputy CIO at a major University, impressive high-profile career, and bundle of contradictions. Extrovert who listens even between the lines. Polished power-suit, first in line for a pie-in-face fundraiser for charity. Ruthless reducer-to-numbers, puts people first.

I was long past expecting to find any mentors in my work life. But Susan was a wonderful surprise. She has a few years on me, and a degree of polish I will never attain. Stylistic differences aside, she is next level. Susan’s ability to measure and mature her organization is a wonder to behold. At the time, she had her work cut out digging an unpopular IT organization out of years of wandering in the desert that is a PeopleSoft implementation. Some previous “hardass” leadership left a path of (justified) mistrust with our community. As DCIO, one of her many jobs was to fix it.

Susan believes in composing a “utility group” from an eclectic mix of skills. She has the capacity to spot talent and acquire it. I don’t mean that because she hired me. She hired me because I could fog a mirror and had written IT policies and wrassled IT vendors. Also, no risk. As a contractor, if it wasn’t working then no harm no foul. I saw her talent acquisition skills in the impressive people around me. You’ll be hearing about some of them. 

Seeing a Competent person in a leadership role was something of a revelation to me. It made me look harder at political and other leaders and I’ve since spotted a small handful of present-day and historical Competents. (Regardless of your political leanings, take a hard look at Elizabeth Warren. Whether you love or hate what she does, no one could deny she does it brilliantly, and she displays the traits we’re discussing here). 

I could give you a laundry-list of traits Susan has, many of them covered in previous articles. The one I think sets her apart, making her an effective executive, is that she notices when people need help, and she helps well.  Susan is about the objective.

Susan has more integrity in her little finger than most people do at all, so she’s not one to take an inappropriate path to any objective. With constraints of ethics and morals, she will also not let any of the following restrain her thinking about how to get from point A to points X, Y, and Z:

• The way it’s always been done

• The way someone’s job description is written

• Anyone’s age, experience, or other “hierarchy” attributes

• That it’s “never been done before” or “is impossible”

• Formalities

• Whether she’ll have to tell her boss something unpleasant

Many people think they work this way. “I tell it like it is.” Some people really do. But most people with this lack of constraints are really just saying the wrong things to the wrong people. They’re “too honest” and are supremely ineffective and surprised when brutal buldozing doesn’t work.

Susan is gracious, practiced, polished, strategic, and tactical. She can bulldoze her way through a china shop leaving no shards behind her. Really, HBR ought to have a team following her around.

I was in no way looking for or expecting to find a mentor when I came to help the University fix their morass of bad IT policy. But I recall at one point explaining that a great failing of mine is “making documents look nice.” I am the “white paper” person, never the “glossy one-sheet” person. My PowerPoints tend to “Russian Novel” style. Passing cats laugh at them. For many years I covered that by saying brazen things like “I don’t need slides to communicate. They’re just a crutch!”

So one day, Susan asked me for some workproduct to show to senior leaders, and I was just apologizing ahead for what was going to be a bloodbath of an executive presentation, and getting ready to grate my eyeballs into a stilted facsimile of a pretty document.

Susan taught me a valuable lesson right then. She didn’t even look up or allow me to waste more than a few words of my apology. She told me to ask someone else to do it.

I was a sole contributor, I didn’t have anyone to delegate to. And I had always taken the view that managers should take the most awful work, so I wouldn’t have delegated something as wretched as making a PowerPoint to a subordinate even when I did have subordinates. But that’s not what Susan meant. She didn’t mean “shuffle off work you don’t like onto someone else.” She meant “find someone good at this and ask them to do it, because you aren’t. And that’s ok.”

Within Susan’s “utility team” we traded skills constantly. I wrote in an earlier article about composing a Competent person out of several people who each have a few of those skills. This team is how I learned that’s possible. This is next-level teamwork. Susan modeled it. She asked us to do things she wasn’t good at, and picked up tasks she does well. There was never shame in being bad at something, everyone is bad at something. The important thing was that the work got done well.

Susan was constantly alert for people who needed help. She didn’t want a “best effort” presentation from me, she wanted a strong one from whoever could pick up that task. She didn’t want me feeling inadequate, or spending a ton of time on something another person could do better in less time. She wanted me doing the work I could do well. So she found someone to do the “pretty document” task, and got more good work (and more appreciation!) out of both of us. 

The lesson hit home harder because I had another leader in my life at the time whose philosophy was “work hard on the thing you’re weakest at.” Which, like many things you might find painted on a reclaimed piece of wood in a home goods store, sounds sensible, but wow is it terrible advice. Maybe if the thing you’re weakest at is breathing you should follow that advice. Otherwise, no.

It really is ok to be bad at something and compensate with other things you do well. If you can work with someone who’s good at your bad things, together you can achieve more. Spending time doing the things we’re good at and (ideally) enjoy, reaps much higher rewards.

I’ve been describing this set of traits to you, and when they most or all occur in one person, that’s someone to watch out for. But it doesn’t have to work that way. If you, like me, won’t be around long enough to gather all of these strengths, try gathering a team instead. If you’ll just never be the one to bring the energy, or remember important details, find people who will and trade for what you are good at.

Heads-down misery creating that broken misfit PowerPoint wouldn’t have won me any particular bonus points in heaven. And as a leader, Susan knew that. The objective is the objective.

Susan was ideally suited to repair broken trust in and outside that IT organization. As a transparent, literally open-door (people would walk in to talk with her constantly) type, she heard the “pain points.” And she’d send the right person with the right skills to work on them.

I’ve been known to say the job she eventually hired me into permanently is half “IT policy” and half “can of worms.” Someone would come to her with a “simple issue” and she’d send me to hunt down the origin of it. I’d pull on the string until the whole ugly sweater unraveled. Then I’d bring it back, and she’d find the resources and political muscle to really solve the actual problem. Or at least understand better how to work around it.

It does not matter to Susan where someone sits in an organization. If they are the person to solve a problem, she’ll find a way to get them on it.

If you’re in IT, you’re probably familiar with “technical debt.” It’s too-fast development with too-little documentation. It’s running too long on the same platforms and getting behind in your lifecycling. It’s operating too many applications that do the same thing and stretching your staff and budgets too thin supporting it all.

Well, there’s a form of “trust debt” an organization can accrue as well. When trust has been scraped like too little butter over burnt toast. When even the most innocuous things generate resistence and suspicion. A Competent leader pays that debt. Susan paid it in a lot of ways I saw. One of the ways was by doing more than just listening and nodding. Following through on fixing.

In leadership or not, Competent people know how to get things done, regardless of who does the work. We’ve all been the “beneficiary” of helping that isn’t help. If you’re of a certain age, the line “some kinds of help are the kind of help that helping’s all about, and some kinds of help are the kind of help, we all can do without.” Susan helps in ways that are helpful. She listens, seeks to understand, then does what she has to. Whether it’s difficult, embarrassing, or will move every piece of cheese in a ten-block radius, by gosh that help will happen. 

A few years ago Susan moved onward and upward, but her utility team had taken root and has been busy continuing what she started. I look forward to telling you about them!