Leading Smart People — Transcript
[00:00:00.00] Ken: There’s a difference, to me, between managing people and leading people, and managing people is about setting a set of expectations up, clearly documented expectations, things like, you know, this is due this date, and that’s due this date, and you need to have this done by this time. That’s kind of falls into the management corp category, but a lot of what you and I did was actually lead people, and I like to believe and I think we were pretty good about this. We had a lot of smart people in our organization. We ultimately started hiring more for smarts than talent. We identified that a number of ways, not the least of which. was looking at advanced degrees. We found things like attorneys had generally very good language skills and sometimes not so much interpersonal skills, but they were good analysts and things like that. So, but broadly leading those people, and again, the distinction is not managing. I found kind of a few things important. First of all, I learned to not beat around the bush. Be direct with smart people. As smart as smart people are, they can be kind of dumb about innuendo, so don’t even, you know, try to insinuate something or reference something. Just be very direct with them. I also found with smart people they weren’t always there for a paycheck. They were there, as a matter of fact, most of them weren’t there for a paycheck. They were there for a vision of what the company was, what we represented, the good we were doing in the world. You can argue whether that was true or not, but without that vision, I don’t think smart people would have stayed. Another thing I found was providing broad guidelines, like telling them to choose the resources they think best, but negotiate with your peers the use. of those resources, things like that, were important in leadership. Meaning I didn’t assign or you or I didn’t assign people to managers or anything like that. We let the managers be leaders. Monitoring people’s progress carefully, not micromanaging, offering suggestions. and giving them time to talk to you rather than assignments was important in leading smart people. Again, you know, give them the rope to do what they need to do. I think acting as an expediter is something you and I both did. If somebody came to us and said, “Hey, we need this resource for this project,” be it a person or a piece of equipment or some other resource, you and I really acted as that rather than directly intervene and say you need this piece of equipment or you need this resource or something like that. With the kind of exception that the last thing about leading smart people for me was only intervening if things really appeared, if I really felt things were headed off the rails. That doesn’t mean don’t let them make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes, but if they were about to make the same mistake a second time or make a mistake that I believed was gonna derail the project or the relationship with the client. client or something, stepping, intervening, maybe supervening is a better word, just guiding them to a better decision rather than trying to manage the situation directly unless they ask me to come in. So that’s kind of my thought about what made us successful as leaders. leaders, again, not managers, but leaders. Do you have some other thoughts or a different opinion?
[00:04:17.09] Jim: - I just want to, I don’t have a different opinion. I just want to add a couple of items to that list. I think, one of the things that we did that may have been different from other firms is that we let our managers manage the client relationship and that’s not risk free because we we would have to counsel people. sometimes on things, as you said, set up the guardrails and let them go and do the job at hand. But I think a lot of firms tried to keep pushing the relationship to the partner level, and we saw this in big and small firms. our competitors. But we, I’m thinking back to most of the projects, especially towards the end of my career, almost all of them, the manager managed the client relationship, and to be honest, that’s where it should be. They’re the, they’re the one closest, they’re the one. a lot of autonomy as to how outcome of that is they appreciated having that and it also lightened the load for you and me.
[00:06:09.26] Ken: Yeah, that’s for sure. This isn’t without its self-serving side and by giving them, you know, as you said, guardrails rather than very narrow lane It took a lot of burden off us
[00:06:29.58] Jim: Yeah, and I know you’d had those moments we’ve talked about this before where especially in the bigger firm You know the partner makes a big deal out of announcing that he’s gonna be on site tell the client that he’s coming and he’s gonna be there and all that as if they managed the relationship, and in some cases they did, and both of us observed the client saying, “Why is he coming? “Tell him to stay home, tell him to stay home.”
[00:07:02.49] Ken: - That one day a quarter or every six months that he showed up just really didn’t add much value. thing, it took away value because it distracted the client from their day-to-day responsibilities. On the other hand, I was always there and let the client know if there was a problem with our project manager or leader on the project. I was available to help resolve it, but I didn’t impose it. myself to have a, you know, every month or three months or whatever it was meeting with the client. I would touch base occasionally, but it would be as unobtrusively as possible. If I was in town, I’d just poke my head in their office and say, “Hey, how are things going?” Or maybe a quick email or a phone call if I wasn’t in town. But that was about it. But it’s that, again, you have the smart people, the permission to manage the client relationship, and it took burden off of us.
[00:08:08.10] Jim: - Yeah, and then as far as leadership style, I need to be a little bit more circumspect, I think, than what I would like to be. You know, too bad this isn’t a live call-in show where whoever I inflicted my leadership
[00:08:31.43] Ken: on gets call-in.
[00:08:32.42] Jim: You know, give either a thumbs up or a thumbs down. But I will say that early in my 20s, I was told to not focus on my own success, but rather the success of those around me or those who might report to me, and that just really stuck for the years that you can work on your own success, but far better to, especially if you have direct reports, far better to make them successful.
[00:09:11.80] Ken: - Yeah.
[00:09:12.88] Jim: - Because it provides an even greater base for business, and I hate to admit this, Ken, but that, that’s one of the better bits that came out of an Amway presentation that was directed at me in my 20s. So there is a little bit of good that comes out of that old Amway routine. Yeah I was always
[00:09:37.74] Ken: Told I was always told to model the behavior you as a leader model the behavior you want people to follow it’s you know You don’t do the “do as I say, not as I do” thing. You model that behavior, and that worked out well for us. Again, giving people autonomy, I think, went down the chain. A lot of our leaders were, our managers were, gave people broad guidelines, and within those guidelines, you know, project, if an individual showed they weren’t capable of handling that amount of freedom, they would slowly bring in those guardrails and, you know, make it narrower and narrower, and at some point, if it got too narrow, they’d come to me and say, “Hey, this person, I need to micromanage this person,” and that’s not, you know, the kind of thing that I would do. of person that should work for us, and I did have that happen a few times, and that was, I was pleased to see it. But again, what you’re talking about is modeling the behavior you want to see. So, you know, you got to live it and breathe it for people to follow you, to be,
[00:10:45.90] Jim: You know, it’s part of being a leader. Yeah, and it strikes me that that we passed that leadership skill or quality down by in general, having even some of our best project managers and just best managers overall, expecting them to also be part of a team. team, because good leaders need to be good followers as well. I think it kind of hones
[00:11:24.33] Ken: Your leadership skills. Yeah, and I think, you know, when the need to know when to lead and when to follow, and very often with our our managers, I’d be a follower. I just, you know, as long as I didn’t feel anything untoward was going on or the project was going south for some reason, I was happy being a follower and when they wanted my advice stepping in or they wanted some action on my part stepping in when they asked, you know, following their lead, yeah, it just made my life easier, particularly as I got to trust them.
[00:12:04.53] Jim: - Freed us up for other things.
[00:12:06.24] Ken: - Right, yeah.