Page 127 - Everything I Know About Business I Learned

Lead by Example

I also learned from those who were not good managers, and
absorbed what skills they lacked, and cataloged them so that I
learned what not to do when I became manager.
And I wasn’t the only one with this approach. Take, for exam-
ple, former CEO Mike Quinlan, who shared this with me: “I was
going up the ladder early. I looked around and I was always the
youngest of everything,” he said. “I looked around at all the peo-
ple I did business with—operators, suppliers, company people—
and observed that many were trying to get by, that some were in
over their head, that some were too political, that some were kind
of cheats; cheats could be a lot of things, a guy that would cheat
on his expense account. When I was being trained as a field con-
sultant, one of the guys who trained me would say, ‘Okay, you
can go to dinner and have a couple of extra drinks and you could
put it on your expense account, you could do this and do that,’
and I thought, no way. And the operators—I used to watch the
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guys I dealt with even before I was a field consultant, I watched
some of them maneuvering and trying to cheat their way, and
you look and you learn. So, I looked and I learned a lot by watch-
ing people—good, bad, and indifferent—and how they do it. And
the ones who had the courage to do the right thing and the abil-
ity to know what the right thing was, and the courage to do it,
were the ones I followed and respected. And one by one, the oth-
ers, you know, they fall by the wayside.”
Mentoring was shown in other ways, by sharing the work-
load by the entire team. David Delgado, now a circuit court
judge, recalled his years in the real estate legal department in
Oak Brook. “I learned so much from my real estate manager,
Bob. He had so much valuable information and was always will-
ing to sit down and go over it step by step. I was not only told
how to do something, I was shown how to do it. It was not
about him as a manager sitting in the corner office, saying fig-
ure it out. I found that to be encouraging. And if I got inundated