Survival: Put yourself on your list each day

Dick Hansen made it into one of my books after he left a corporate conference and flew home for his son’s birthday. From another manager or executive this may not have caught my attention except that he was the organizer of the conference and manager of the thousands in attendance.

My team and I were honored to be his professional development consultants for his large organization within Lucent Technologies. Enjoying dinner before I was to speak, we chatted about the ultimate results he wanted for his people. I’ve long forgotten about his objectives; what I vividly recall is how he described putting anniversaries, birthdays and special personal events on his calendar before work or even community activities. I could hardly believe that he actually flew home for one afternoon and returned to the conference the next day.

I have never doubted how Mr. Hansen’s philosophy also applies to small businesses and even start ups. A strong sense of self protects you as a leader, founder or manager. This implies that your life matters. Leaders who believe this will transfer this value to their families and employees. It’s tough because you will be forced to say “no” when others robotically say “yes.” You will miss events that others attend for show. In spite of these rough spots your actions open a door to a healthy and happy life while you still drive your business down the path of success.

For you to survive and succeed as a fully functioning human being, you need to be very good at a few things:

Showing up: Be sure to go and participate with your employees and partners. Be visible and in-person — nothing else will match the impact of your presence. Sure this sounds like a contradiction — figure it out! Do you want to be a remote ‘texter’ who suffers from constant communication snafus and misunderstandings or would you like to take the time to live life and run your business as a person? It takes time to save time.

Giving information: You can leverage the efforts of employees, vendors and consultants if you trust them with vital information. Once in a while you will get burned but the benefits will outweigh the betrayals. One of the better consequences of being open with information is that you don’t have to micromanage every detail of your start-up.

Engaging adversaries: Dick taught me to regularly meet with adversaries within the organization. He gave them time, access and a voice. At times, I was enraged at what they did to him and how they threatened his and our initiatives — often at the last moment. We had the best motive and adversaries seemed to endlessly question and sabotage us. Turns out they were actually confused and just trying to do what they thought was their job — they needed “ears” on our side and a “voice” on theirs.

Giving in: So sorry if this sounds wimpy. I’ve mentioned how you should show up, share information and engage but be prepared to compromise. From a strong person, this has powerful impact on other people involved. An Intel engineering manager confided in me that the biggest challenge after his promotion was to stop trying to keep up with each of his employees’ individual engineering specialties. The attempt to keep up with everyone was driving him crazy and came across as untrusting. After learning to trust them he found that his former know-it-all style had been unnecessary and even damaging. So, give in and trust the knowledge and consider the opinions of others.

Years later after a stellar corporate career and a couple of forays into smaller businesses, Mr. Hansen never had to ransom back the love of his son. He taught me to “put yourself on your list each day.”

Rick Griggs is a former Intel Corp. training manager and inventor of the rolestorming creativity tool. He speaks on balance, teams and the confidence of Napoleon. Reach him at 970-690-7327.

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