The General

With an anchor in place in our exploration of leadership styles I have experienced and learned from, I want to share a story about one of my favorite CEOs I worked with.  Before I do it would be a good exercise for me to share with you my thoughts about his style.  He was ex-military.  There, enough said.  Ok, there is a bit more. He was the CEO and I learned that CEOs are people.   The first time I met him, I was in awe.  Here I am meeting a CEO, a titan of industry, a person who leads an entire enterprise.  I had never considered that in the end, he was a person.  He led with a tight command structure.  His executives were his lieutenants, and those lieutenants had their sergeants, and I was just a corporal; a foot soldier.  At least that was my first takeaway.

The biggest lesson I took from him was delegation to those who care.  It was almost opposite to his chain of command. We all know a lot of good leaders delegate, but he would forgo his own chain of command and delegate to those who demonstrated a passion for the work topic at hand.

Here is the story.  Once a month, the entire staff had a meeting.  At this meeting, I asked for a status update on the planning of what was going to be our first all-employee annual meeting.  That meeting came out of an employee survey that asked for more communications.   The promise was made and there I was, an engineer.  I was building things for the company at the time. I worked with things, not with people really; at least not with people who were not also of the engineer mind. In my desire for him to meet the promise that he had made, I was managing up to him; asking him what was going on.  Yes, I suspected the promise was lost.  The loss wasn’t him, but one of his lieutenants.  I was a lowly corporal in the organization, pushing on the general in front of the entire command staff.  

He looked at me, at within a few moments of pondering, he said; you will let me know once you get something started.  In that very moment, he saw (perhaps before I even knew it in myself) that he cared not just about him, but all the employees who were looking for something better.  At that moment, I was an engineer, being asked to plan and deploy a human relationship-building function.  He had delegated a task of some importance to someone who was invested in its success.  Along with a team of employees, I planned and executed many years of employee meetings before handing it off to our human resources group.  

As leaders develop, it is my belief that we tend to gravitate toward what is our strengths along with what was modeled in our environment.  At that moment, I learned the power of delegation; not just to anyone, but to those who have a strong investment in the task regardless of the specific role they have.