Management lessons nailed from my childhood.
I’m a tinkerer. Always have been. My earliest childhood memory of tinkering was when I was about 6. My grandparents owned a hardware store in Roodepoort. No.66 Mare Street. Oh what a joyous place that was. The closest thing to heaven I could ever imagine. We weren’t rich growing up and my dad gave me a hammer from the store for my sixth birthday present earlier that year. It was so that periodically I could climb up onto the roof of our store as well as the accompanying living quarters and knock down any roof nails that had come undone. It was an old building, the rafter wood was rotten and light breezes sometimes pulled the corrugated zinc sheeting out of their mounts. That and burglars. Wily cunning burglars often couldn’t tell in the dead blackness of night the layering of the corrugated sheets. So they would at random pull out roof nails to ascertain if that sheet was the easiest sheet to lift up to gain illicit access to our wares. I was the splinter in their folly. The thorn in their sides. Constantly plaguing their efforts by re-knocking in unfastened nails. They would need to re-envisage their plans and start from scratch once again. Anyway, I had a hammer. A splendid force of destruction. I would test its might against coal, and old bricks. It was tremendous fun.
Right about that time during my juvenile years we also had a caretaker/helper for our shop. His name was Abrahm. He would put on our window fences in the evening, to deter burglars from rock throwing attempts to steal our display items, as well as a massive portable burglar gate. He would remove these items in the mornings. One of the other items he was tasked with was the chopping of wood for our oven. He was a burly man that brought down with a heft a cleaved axe onto block of wood and smote them into two. This axe….this destructive item competed with my attention. I was also fond of my hammer though. So I asked him one day: “Abrahm, How would one go about chopping wood with a hammer?” He thought about it for a day and came back with a winning solution. Take a broken axe-head and using the hammer tap it into the grain of the wood, then with a sledgehammer smash the wedged steel head and voila, split wood chunks. If you ever came to the back of 66 Mare Street in Roodepoort in 1986 or thereabouts, you would have seen a 6 year old boy attempt to do the same. Swinging an 8 pound hammer at a block of wood wearing the broadest smiles. You would not have seen that same smile again for the rest of that childs’ life.
Even in this trivial setting the first management lessons were imparted to me:
- Listen attentively to your client/staff/sub-ordinates. They are first-line receptors to issues that plague your business. Dismissing them because of immediate time pressures will lead to symptom chasing and re-iteration of past consequences.
- Take the time to figure a solution that guides them from their affinities to positions of strength. This is empowerment. If Abrahm had said to me: “Use a chainsaw” (Which is a good solution), he would have lost it on me for several reasons
- I was not accustomed to a chain-saw. My fears in this area would have made me averse to wood chopping. Sure, in time I might have gotten familiar with that tool. But that momentary trepidation mounted upon perhaps the back of similar past disquiets would have slowly eroded our trust and bond and over time I might have disengaged and lost faith in his ability to effectively mentor me.
- He did not answer my question, nor take time to adapt solutions to me, but rather thought of me as a pawn with extra hands to accomplish the goal of wood chopping.
- He overlooked my value in the task but saw rather only the output. That makes me feel indifferent and expendable. I want to feel part of the solution. I want to be excited about what I do. I want my efforts be meaningful, not only to myself but to the whole picture as well. Discounting “me” means you’d prefer a machine than a person and therefore you don’t need “me”, and consequentially I shouldn’t need you either.
- Guide your underlings by walking them through the task. Handholding if you like. Show them that you are prepared to do what you ask of them. This is often taken so much for granted. Ego’s, arrogance and power plays oft play a role in strengthening the divisor line between manager and employee. This manager would not use these soapbox dictatorship mechanisms at home but once the suit is drawn, do different tactics become justified?
Sidebar: Why do managers do this? Spew forth hurried vagaries and rapid instructions with scant attention to details. When failures arise they are just as quick to assign fault. Without walking the path you aren’t sure what dangers lay ahead. Certainly cannot blame the navigator when the initial direction was misguided.
Even though Abrahm had not meant to convey anything remotely linked to management, he did so with such casualness and simplicity that one might have only witnessed his gallantry. I believe great managers are like Abrahm. They have humility and subtly make you feel accomplished. They believe in partnering victories and transmitting credit. They lay the groundwork for their sub-ordinates and slowly but steadily build on those foundations. They take you from a place of comfort to a place of joy as easy and simply as if they were tying their shoelaces.