Leadership in Practice: The Saint-Exupéry Gambit

Leadership in Practice: The Saint-Exupéry Gambit

In my last post, I mentioned the distinction between management (the science getting work done using other people) and leadership (the art of getting other people to do what you want them to do), and that most people find one of these disciplines easier to understand than the other. Some of you are probably scientists, or at least craftspeople, carefully examining the skill sets of your employees to determine how to achieve the most efficient employment of those skills, but uncertain how to get the people involved to do what you want. Some of you are probably natural leaders, able to get the entire work group to follow you no matter what, but unsure of what orders to give in order to get the tasks at hand accomplished efficiently.

Up until business school, I had always fallen into the first group. I found the science of management as easy as the art of leadership was hard, and I worried about what might happen to me in a leadership role, if I ever had one again. It happened that not long after learning this distinction, I found myself in a role where leadership was going to be key. I had taken a job with a national retail chain, and was assigned to be the Assistant Manager (or Floor Manager, because this is the individual assigned to run the sales floor) of a large drug store in Los Angeles. Up to that point, the largest number of people I’d had reporting to me was 14, and the largest group I’d ever had to deal with at one time was about 3. Now I had a crew of 60 to look after, and most of them had been on the job a lot longer than I had…

Well, actually, all of them had been on the job longer than me; I’d been hired 12 weeks earlier and rushed through an abbreviated “management training program.” To make matters worse, the specific crew assigned to me had been in place an unusually long time for that company; the average length of service for my new staff was about 18 years. Or about 78 times longer than mine, if you like. I had to figure out what work assignments to make, and how to get my people to do what I wanted, and I had to get started at once if I wanted to keep the job…

I spent most of my first week on the job meeting everybody and reviewing their training records to figure out what they knew how to do, but as to the rest of it, I was stumped. How did I give credible orders to people with 78 times my experience? Preferably without looking like a complete twerp? It was at that point that I remembered a gambit from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French aviator, explorer and author. In his best-known work, The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry has the title character encounter a number of adults who represent different human behaviors. One of these is a king, who claims to have absolute rule over the entire universe. Everything and everybody obeys the king at all times because, as it turns out, he invariably orders everyone and everything to do exactly what they were going to do anyway…

Armed with this knowledge, I began the next day by going to each member of the crew and asking them what they had planned to do today, and writing it down on the day’s assignments sheet. If the employee was going to do what I wanted them to do, I’d just approve the assignment and move on; if not, I’d ask them if they had time to take on the assignment I wanted them to do. If somebody was planning to do less than 8 hours work during their 8 hour shift, I would grin at them and say, “Give me something else to work with, or the Boss is just going to kick this back and make me give you something else to do.” Which was the truth; if the store’s General Manager didn’t like my assignments, he would add things on to each employee’s task list. And he’d usually add on a lot more than my crew or I thought was reasonable for eight hours work.

Word got around quickly that I was working with my people, distributing the work as evenly as possible, and trying to keep the General Manager from assigning them extra work as a punishment. More importantly, everyone realized that I wasn’t trying to tell them how to do their jobs; I was learning from them how the store worked and making sure everybody got a fair workload. Within a few days, all I had to do was walk around the store in the morning and write everything down, and the work took care of itself – or more accurately, my veteran crew got it done for me.

After three months or so, the General Manager came up to me one afternoon, and gestured to the assignments list for the day (now almost completed). “You know, most of the Assistant Managers I’ve had assigned here barely wrote anything down on the task list,” he remarked. “A third of a page at best, and it never seemed to get done anyway. You’re filling out two or three full pages every day, and everything is getting done, too! How the heck are you doing that?”

I thought about telling him that a Little Prince (or a legendary French aviator) had given me a hint, but decided against it…