I was traveling in China all this past week, which brings me to a jet-lagged week after and all the aches, sleep deprivation and crankiness; so forgive me a moment to rant about behavioral teaching and the responsibilities of my generation to be noble leaders.
My last meeting in Shenzhen was filled with c-suite men from the United States who should know better. My company is small, “proud and poor” I like to say, and from the moment I showed up in this company’s boardroom I had to hang on to the pride because poor was all they deigned to see. I am used to this from a certain type of American executive. You know him too: he shows up to every meeting late and makes it restart so he can be brought up to speed. He takes out a phone and begins replying to something while you are talking. He expects “his people” to deal with the details and is pretty clear he has to be somewhere else more urgent. He’s the guy who’s not interested in doing something so much as he’s interested in being somebody. The mindset this person brings is not involved in learning anything. The problem is that what they are in fact doing is teaching, and the lessons are universally corrupt.
In this meeting, I was paying attention to the most junior member of their group—a young Chinese man who was looking on his cadre of executives with earnestness and admiration. The American executives, well-coiffed, and French-cuffed brought their assistant in to serve us coffee and take notes, and from the first moment taught that young man “this is how we act.” Yet, my half dozen other meetings in China hadn’t been that way. When I met with a provincial minister over lunch, you would have thought I represented as much business as a Fortune 500 company. A senior executive at another company profusely apologized for a minor equipment malfunction. Yet another included junior staff member’s opinions the same as any other. And I suppose that was the lesson: there are no juniors in a well-run team. We are all serving each other in a fashion.
The was this one time someone asked me about how I interview people. I told them that interviews for people working for me start with the first interaction we have with you. I debrief everyone that comes in contact with a candidate, from the front desk in the lobby to assistants to everyone else in the interview group. If I can, I get the candidate out to a meal to see how they treat the staff at the restaurant. What I’m looking for is behavior—how do they treat people, especially those they might view as “beneath” them?
Noble leaders on the best teams take their jobs as teachers seriously; teaching is their first job. They look for opportunities to act out “doing.” The self-referential executive, he of the attention deficit and unearned confidence, needs to be shown the door. There are far better teachers out there.