My model for a good manager and leader throughout most of my career was someone who was in perfect control and had all the answers. There was an expectation at my places of work that “the boss” was always the smartest person in the room. When I first moved into leadership positions, I also modeled that behavior. Everyone seemed to want me to have all the answers, so I pretended I did. I didn’t, of course. No one has ALL the answers, ALL of the time. But that was the macho leadership model I was taught. As I grew older and hopefully a bit wiser, I began to see a different model. The leaders I began to admire and emulate were not the loud, brash ones. In fact, they were often not the most visible people and certainly not the most vocal. They led from out front when they needed to do so, but mostly they deferred to those who had the most expertise in the topic of the day. They were humble (you KNOW that will be my “H” word); they knew that they were NOT necessarily the smartest person in the room and they actively looked to surround themselves with people who were smarter than they were. In some organizations, leaders like that do not advance because the culture of that organization requires a macho leader. However, in good organizations those are exactly the leaders that excel.

Learning to defer to those with greater expertise was hard for me to do.  As we have amply discussed, I am a control freak and us control freaks want things done our way.  It makes me cringe to type this, but the reason I want things done my way is because I believe that my way, my beliefs, my views are the best; that I am the smartest person in the room.  Ouch.  Earlier in my career, admitting I didn’t know something was seen as a real liability.  I remember meeting with someone in engineering and asking for their thoughts on something that they knew a lot about and I knew nothing.  I thought that was a wise thing to do.  I found out later, through a friend, that that senior engineer saw my questioning as a sign of weakness!  I was blown away by that!  Why on earth should he think that a young chemist should know about a complicated engineering problem?!  You can imagine the dampening effect that comment had on my willingness to ask questions.

As my career progressed, I began to learn to ask more questions instead of assuming I had all the answers.  Counterintuitively, this became easier the more senior I got.  For some reason, the senior person in the room was allowed to ask the “stupid questions” because their seniority gave them legitimacy.  I felt free to ask someone to explain what some acronym meant, or what some test meant, or what the assumptions were around some marketing data.  Time and time again, I could see body language in others that told me that I wasn’t the only one who had a given question.  But others were not comfortable asking for fear of being judged.

Pretending you understand can be really dangerous.  Remember the Great Recession of 2009?  Part of what drove the economy into the ground was the collapse of firms holding billions in Collateralized Debt Obligations, wherein financial firms packaged up high risk mortgage loans into “high return” investment vehicles.  As people defaulted on the loans, the financial firms who held those CDO’s lost tons and tons of money overnight; losses snow balled; firms went bankrupt; you know the rest.  That is probably a really wrong explanation because I do not understand CDO’s.  But in Monday Morning Quarterbacking the causes of the Great Recession, much was written about complex financial instruments that people (professional financial managers, not ordinary investors) were buying but that they did not understand.  They did NOT understand the risks!  But they couldn’t admit that they didn’t understand.

What I found, toward the end of my career, is that the more questions I asked and the more I deferred to people smarter than I was on various topics, the smarter I actually became.  I was learning every day.  My skill is in being able to take in new information, tie it to what I already know, and ask questions to make sure I am not making faulty assumptions.  I actually WANT to learn that I have made faulty assumptions because I revel in learning new things.  This is making my retirement a lot of fun!  Add this to the things I wish I had learned earlier.

Let me tell you, then, about the last couple of weeks since I wrote about Control.  When we last left our home renovation saga, the granite people had just found a new slab to hopefully match the granite they had cut incorrectly for the bathroom vanity in the new bedroom, and I was gearing up to watch the Eagles play in the Super Bowl.  After I posted that last essay, I got the reminder about my colonoscopy on Monday.  Yes, I had scheduled a colonoscopy for the morning after my hometown team played in the Super Bowl.  I spent the Super Bowl prepping for the scope.  I reacted badly to the new prep I tried, suffering from severe nausea, chills, and a racing heart.  It barely registered that the Eagles lost.  I did not sleep all night and was comatose the next day after the procedure.  Then, for good measure, my laptop crashed in the middle of a Zoom call with my college friends.  The hard drive died a violent death.  The granite people went radio silent again.  More and more details kept popping up that slowed down the completion of the renovation.  The guy came to install the carpet in the new bedroom and, when he unrolled the carpet, found that it was stained and moldy from top to bottom.  Over this same time period, my Mom was moving to a different senior living facility and I was coordinating from afar with my sister, who did the lion’s share of the work.  I was left with worry and anxiety that all would go well.  We ran ourselves ragged over three days moving back into the house anyway since the kitchen was done, dodging the painters who were still finishing up.  And Bridget, of course, threw up in her carrier during the literally half mile drive home.  I couldn’t control anything.  I couldn’t fix anything.  I had to defer to the expertise of those around me and trust that they would make it all happen.  And it has.  Or it will. 

We are back in the house.  The kitchen is freaking beautiful.  Not perfect, but perfection cannot be the goal.  The cats are settled.  The rest of the house, outside of the new main bedroom, is coming together.  My laptop has a brand new hard drive; most of the data were saved; and, it’s faster than the day I bought it.  Mom is settling into her new community.  I’m about to go away for a few days with my college friends.  There has been a lot of deep breathing, some pulled muscles, and fights with Trish over little things.  But, like most things in life, this is working out.  Over and over again, I have to learn the lesson that most things DO work out.  It’s a lesson in Endurance.