The Ray Lesson

The Ray Lesson

Some years ago, when I was working in the drugstore, I happened across an example of a “managing up” situation so extreme as to constitute a parody of the way these situations are supposed to work. Yet I feel the solution I worked out (and the lesson I learned in doing so) are worth repeating, if only as a humorous way of making my point…

When I first reported to my new store, all of the people already on the staff made a point of telling me to look out for the store’s Operations Manager, who I’ll call Ray. The Operations Manager is the second-in-command of a drugstore; he or she handles functions like inventory control, forward planning, ordering and so on, reporting to the General Manager and in turn supervising the Assistant Manager (or Floor Manager). Quite often the Operations Manager will function like the Executive Officer of a military unit or the COO of a company, and in many cases this individual will be being groomed for a General Manager’s position and a store of his/her own.

Ray was another matter. The story went that some years earlier, the company had accused Ray of embezzlement, but botched the investigation and were unable to prove he had done anything wrong. Ray had then sued the company and won, resulting in a large judgment against his employer and a work situation in which the company was unable to discipline him for any infraction short of a (provable!) major felony for fear of additional legal action. All of my new co-workers went out of their way to tell me how Ray never did any work, made the previous Assistant Managers do all of his work for him, and so on.

I have always made a point of making my own decisions about people; I also try to be aware of the fact that not everything the veteran employees tell the “new guy” is going to be completely true. Consequently, I reserved judgment about Ray until I got to know him for myself. My first impression of Ray was that he seemed like a nice enough person, but somehow unfulfilled, or at least frustrated. More than you would expect from a guy who knows he will never be promoted again unless he leaves the company, that is.

In talking with Ray, it rapidly came up in conversation that his greatest ambition was to attend law school and become an attorney, but he was unable to generate a sufficiently high score on the LSAT exam to get into any law program. Even those schools requiring only basic literacy and a check for the tuition were unwilling to take a chance on him. Ray was obviously quite intelligent, but the ability to get a high score on standardized tests actually has little to do with how intelligent you are; it’s more a function of how good you are at taking standardized tests.

As it happened, I had used The Princeton Review preparation guide when I took the GMAT (for business school), and I thought their method might work for Ray. Unlike a lot of the other test preparation services, Princeton Review does not just provide practice questions and drills on how to do them; instead, they teach you how the test questions are put together, and how to take them apart. Or, as they call it, how to “crack the system.”

I won’t specify Ray’s cultural background, except to say that I had grown up around a lot of his people, and I knew that as a rule they took a positive glee in cracking any system they encountered. By this, I mean no criticism of Ray or his people; it’s just one of their traditional values, no better or worse than anyone else’s. But I was pretty sure that Ray would take to the Princeton Review method like the proverbial duck to water, and suggested that he try it.

The results were, to say the least, dramatic. Ray bought the LSAT review book, read through it carefully, and then saw his score on the practice test rise by something like 60% in a week. He went out and signed up for the Princeton Review course as well, and watched his score continue to rise. When he took the LSAT the next time it was available, his score went from off the scale on the low end to absolutely stellar. He applied to all of the Law programs in the Los Angeles area, and was eventually accepted everywhere except UCLA.

Even more dramatic, however, was the effect all of this had on my working conditions. From the first day I told Ray about the Princeton Review, he became convinced that I was the greatest guy in the world, or at least, the greatest one in our company’s uniform. Not only did he never ask me to do any of his work, he started ordering other people to do MY work, so we could go sit in the office and talk about admissions strategies. For the rest of my time in that unit, managing my nominal boss (managing up) was as easy as asking for what I wanted.

The lesson I took away from all of this, the Ray Lesson, as I call it, is that everybody wants something, including your immediate boss. If you can find a way to get it for him…