Concrete and Gold (eBook)

1: The Premise

Leading isn’t easy sometimes. Actually, that’s an understatement. Leading isn’t easy all the time. Especially when you lead people. There is a difference between managing and leading. I’m sure we have all seen the graphics, memes, and pictures of the difference between a boss and a leader. Take a look at this picture. What’s the difference?

The top is a picture of a boss. The person in the leadership position is sitting on a block while their team pulls the weight. The bottom is a picture of a leader. The person in the leadership position is in front, pulling the weight with the team.       

Simply put, managing a team, being able to cast vision, coming up with a mission statement, and being able to turn profits does not make you a leader. You can be in a position of authority and actually do 0% leading and 100% managing or maintaining. Ineffective leading results in poor team performance and/or high turnover. I’ve heard it said by Patrick Lencioni, and I’m paraphrasing, “People don’t leave organizations, people leave people. People leave bosses.”

Understanding how to lead your team will be rewarding to not only you as the leader, but also your team. This can be challenging, especially if you have already developed a leadership style different than what you’re about to read. Moving and progressing your organization forward will take teamwork, and teams are inherently made up of different personalities, strengths, and weaknesses. Being a leader that can recognize all of these qualities and adapt will not only make progress organizationally, but he or she will also cultivate a team and culture that is all-in with the organizational goals. It is not a bad thing to maintain if that is what your goal is. It is not a bad thing to manage, as long as you understand that you are managing assets. But if you are charged with forging ahead, taking ground, and inspiring people, maintaining and managing won’t accomplish that. It simply won’t. I have been managed, and I have been told to maintain, and in both of those scenarios, the organization did nothing but stagnate. When we maintained, we kept a great steady flow of income financially, because we got really good at what we were doing, but that only lasted until our competitors got really good at doing something new. We watched other organizations surpass us and saw our clients do business with them, because they were innovating in the industry we were in.

Our leadership team had their eyes set firmly on maintaining the traction that we had gained, all the while shying away from leading our team members to be creative and to think outside the box. We maintained and did what we knew to do, and our leaders managed the teams at work. They refused to see the teams as innovators to be inspired, and mistakenly gave in to the mindset that people were assets to be managed, like an inventory or budget. Our teams grew hungry for something new. Leaders were replaced with like-minded individuals to only “rinse and repeat” what happened before. Free thought was challenged, and the premise of leadership was branded with the name “leadership”, but it resembled something completely different. We were not being led to take ground. We were not being inspired by those who had the ability to inspire us, but in fact, it was quite the opposite. We were stagnating in our own pool of “this is the way we have always done it.” Stagnant water stinks and so did that. Ironically, I worked for a technology company!

Years before that, as a teenager, I got the privilege of being mentored by a leader who showed me what leadership should be at the core. You hear scholars and authors talk about this term “leadership” all the time. There are a lot of definitions of what leadership is, and they all sound pretty similar. They make it sound easy, but the truth is, it is incredibly hard to lead people. Some will say that leadership is taking people from where they are to where they need to go. Some proclaim that leadership is the act of casting vision for something that inspires so much that people can’t refuse to go there.

While those are parts of leadership, I’m not convinced that you can wrap up the act of leading in a one sentence description. It sounds great, and it fits on a poster, but it misleads new leaders who are learning about leadership. The person that I learned the most basic, yet most important, principle of leadership from was Scott “Bull” Allen. He led what we called “the work crew” at Six Flags Over Texas in the late 90’s.

I started at Six Flags at the ripe old age of 14, and I worked as a cashier in one of the stores. The store I worked in was the first one in the theme park. I’ll be the first person to say that I haven’t always been a “people person,” and to some extent, I’m still not. When guests entered the store, every child and teenager played with these hammers that were located by the front entrance. The hammers were yellow through the middle and had a red squeaker on each side of the hammer head. When you hit them on anything at all, they let out a loud, high-pitched squeak. So, after a summer of hearing kids hit squeak hammers for nine hours a day, every day, I tendered my resignation from Six Flags. When I tendered my intent of departure from squeak hammer village, I was asked to try another position, so I relented, and gave it a shot.

I was whisked away into a world of theater and production at the live performances at the amusement park. I started out as a seating attendant; I seated people and swept popcorn. It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t amazing. However, I got to be inside the theater when the changeovers were happening, and I got to know the person leading the technical crew: Bull. At 16, I worked in the backstage areas and also on the work crew. Bull saw his people as a team that he got to accomplish the impossible with, not just a team to get things done. He treated us like family, and we did the same to him. We would often work 70 or 80-hour weeks and not blink an eye. This is where we wanted to be, because this is where we found a family in the people we worked with and in the one who led us. We didn’t complain about the hours, and we found ways to make the hard work really fun. Bull led from the front. This is an important principle of leadership, and I think every leader agrees. The difference I saw in Bull, as opposed to other leaders, is that while Bull was leading from the front, he was encouraging everyone, all the way to the back. He was always looking back to make sure we were with him. He was always teaching, not only the skills of the trade, but also the skills of life. Bull treated us like family, and this cultivated a family culture amongst our team that transferred through any job we were doing. We were not only getting the job done, but we were also working hand-in-hand with close friends to accomplish something great. It really was fun. It was life giving, and because the culture started at the top with our leader, it trickled all the way through our entire team.

His feelings about his team were solidified for me on a day late in March one year. We had a major accident during the teardown of one of our events. My friend Willard and the rest of the crew were taking down what we call a “rooftop” stage. We lowered and disassembled the roof, and the next step was taking down the towers on the four corners of the stage. Bull was driving one of the large forklifts, and Willard was climbing the tower to attach it to the forks. The way Willard describes the accident is that when he got to the top of the tower and began reaching out to attach the rigging to the forks, it appeared that Bull was backing up because the forks were moving away from him. What actually was happening was that Willard was moving away from the forks because someone on the ground had unbolted the structure holding the tower in place too early. The tower came crashing down with Willard attached to it via his harness. He was pulled to the pavement and was injured very badly.

An ambulance rushed him to the hospital, where his injuries were assessed, and he was admitted to the hospital. He sustained a broken arm, several broken ribs, several bad cuts in many places, and a 3-inch screw lodged into his shoulder just millimeters from a crucial bloodline that could have killed him if it were punctured. Thankfully, Willard got released from the hospital the next day.

Bull loved his team like family, and he hand-picked who got to be on this team. As a leader, tough conversations are there, and they present themselves in a myriad of situations. Bull had to deal with the mistake that ultimately resulted in the tower falling with Willard on it. More importantly, he had to deal with the individual who made that mistake.

I got to work early the next day and walked into our team office where Bull was sitting at his desk. He was sobbing. I had never seen a grown man, especially one of his size (he was nicknamed “Bull” for a reason), cry like that. We talked for a few minutes, and he revealed his heart to me. He couldn’t believe that one of our team members, under his leadership, had been injured because of a preventable accident. He was vulnerable, as opposed to other leaders that may have thought they needed to be strong in that scenario. I felt closer to him from that moment on. He was worried about the conversation he was going to have later that day with my coworker who made the mistake. When it was time for the conversation to take place, there wasn’t a “write-up;” no “pack your stuff, and we’re walking you out;” and definitely no shame on my coworker for the outcome of that accident....