Page 34 - Make Work Great

You . . . as the Seed

ive manager and he appreciated it. You know, a polite way of saying,
“Not much.” After all, I did all the work, right?
Years after our professional relationship ended, we were reminisc-
ing as friends over tea, and the situation came up. “I knew that you

would get it figured out if everyone would just stay out of your way,”
she told me with a smile. “So I kept them out of your way.” Then she
told me the real story.
Working behind the scenes to reduce the impact of problematic peo-
ple was the tip of the iceberg of Emma’s involvement. She campaigned
constantly and silently to keep me on track. Senior management at the
tile shop wanted to replace me with someone more seasoned, whose

experience was commensurate with the financially large and frighten-
ing nature of the problem. Emma showed them what I was doing and
convinced them that I was best suited to solve it because I understood
both sides. Operations management didn’t want to support my inves-
tigative measurements; the shop was overloaded with orders already!
Emma convinced them to do so despite their objections. Then she
talked with tile-making line workers, those tasked with the actual
measuring, to teach them the importance of what they were doing.
Meanwhile, she leaned on people she knew in the mosaic factories,
reassuring them of my competence and soliciting their support. To
save me a little time, she even loaned me her administrative assistant
to type up the notes from my problem-solving meetings.
Emma may have been my manager, but she was defi nitely a leader.
She worked within her well-established network of influence to pave

the way for my progress. She taught people the value of what I was
doing and how to support it. She taught her fellow managers to allow
the problem to be solved by not meddling and producing more chaos.
She taught some fairly pushy factory executives how to listen a little
better. And along the way, she taught me what I was capable of by
allowing me both to do the work and to benefi t from it.
I didn’t remotely appreciate it at the time, but what Emma did
amounted to cultural change. She created an environment in which
I had a reasonable chance of success within a broader context that
wouldn’t have allowed it. Then she left the rest to me.

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