I was reflecting recently on leadership, and my own growth journey. I found myself remembering incidents from my past: some where I showed leadership, and some where I performed less well. One example of the former I am still proud of.
As a young production supervisor, I was responsible for the daily operation of a solder wire factory. The solder was cast into ingots, extruded with a flux core, passed through a series of wire drawing machines to reduce the diameter before being wound onto bobbins, packaged and then despatched. I had around 30 people in my team.
The lesson I learnt during my time in that role was, if you want to lead, you first need to understand and, if you want to understand, you need to show humility and inhabit other people’s worlds. You need to communicate with people, not talk at them.
Whilst I was in the role, I did my best to learn to do each of the roles on the shopfloor. I started in the casting area. As a fairly gauche graduate, I massively underestimated what they did. I could manage, at most, about 30 minutes of ladling 20kg ingots of tin / lead solder into the moulds. After this, my arms were burning, I was drenched in sweat, and I could barely move for the rest of the day. I’d then stagger off leaving the real men to keep going for the remaining 7.5 hours of their shift.
Following this, I tried my hand at the packing area. I could manage this more easily. It was a central location and, from here, I could see most of the work stations. It was also a genuine bottleneck that needed about 1.1 operators – I think I just about contributed the 10% required. During my hour a day on this work station, I learnt that Jimmy Chung, the normal operator in this area, was an extra in martial arts films, and normally worked 4 – 6 days a month on film sets.
As I moved around the work stations, asking the operators to show me how – rather than telling them, I found that, in my team, I had, as well as a film star, I had a model (22 stone, advertised Arsenal supporters kit for the larger man), a pensions trustee, charity workers, school governors and a host of other, amazing people. I had started out thinking I was there to manage them, and I realised they were teaching me how to lead.
After about 6 months of working alongside the team, I had a good relationship with everyone bar Denis. Denis was in his mid-50s, looked like the 118 man, and was consistently negative and rude. I realised I was starting to avoid him, and, like previous managers before, was marginalising him rather than changing him. I needed to harden up, and tackle the issue!
The first part was to change my routine to match his. In a 0700 in my work wear. I changed where I parked so I had to walk in with him and past his work station. Next was a friendly comment to him every day, regardless of his response. Finally, I engaged him in team meetings, always drawing him in and asking him his views.
Net result – abject failure. I still hadn’t found any shared ground.
After some enquiries, I found that Denis was very keen on tropical fish. He kept tanks of them, and spent his spare time breeding and exhibiting them. It was time to become an expert in fish keeping. This was before the internet and Google, so I was unable to do this in front of my PC – I needed to work hard for the information.
After a while, my wife started worrying. Why was I going to the library to get out books on fish? Why was I insisting on visiting the local garden centre to look at the tanks? Why was I talking about water filters and heaters?
It all paid off. After a few months, I went to ask Denis for some advice about what fish to buy and how to care for them. From that day onwards we would chat for 10-15 minutes every day about how my fish were getting on, and he started bringing me in pictures of his fish to show me. Shortly after that, Denis started to contribute with the rest of the team, and became, if not a positive influence, then at least a neutral element on the shopfloor.
As a 25 year old, I’d learnt a very powerful lesson. If you want to change someone, you need to go and live in their world first, before you try and show them your world. Understand their needs before sharing yours. 20+ years on I still do my best to live by that lesson. Sometimes I know I’m not, arrogance, laziness and smugness have taken over. When that happens, something will remind me of Denis’s fish, and I’ll know I need to climb off my ivory tower and start asking people about themselves and listening again!
In case you’re wondering, my lessons on fish were not that effective. They died and we bought some cats.
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