If I Ran the Circus...

A long time ago, in an industry that no longer exists, I had the unusual problem of having been promoted far beyond anything I was prepared to do, and discovering that while the Peter Principle should have been in effect, it wasn't. I had a degree in English and a year plus on the job when I was promoted to be the manager of the work group of which I had been a part, responsible for 14 service locations in Metro Los Angeles and the rather eccentric men (there were no women at the time) who operated them. I had become the Regional Director of the Professional Resume and Writing Service...

I should have been terrified. In the cold light of a business degree and twenty additional years of experience, I can see that I was clearly being set up to take the blame for the failure (and ultimate dismantling) of the Los Angeles Region, which would in turn deflect the blame for this fiasco from the Executive whose marketing incompetence (I can not in good conscience call it anything else) had doomed the Region, the Division, and ultimately the company. The Executive in question being the President's son, of course...

Not realizing any of this, I set about running the Los Angeles Region the way I thought it SHOULD be run, based on nothing but a young man's romantic ideas about leadership. My predecessor in the role had been an alcoholic sexist bigot, whose parting advice to me was to never hire women or African Americans to be resume writers, because "They can't handle the job." Naturally my first two hires were D.L. Mackey, a woman, and Deborah Givins, an African American woman. Deborah did a fine job running one of my offices that had struggled previously, and D.L. broke all of the Region's performance records for sales, revenue and productivity that summer (the ones I had set the year before, it should be noted). I have always believed that racism and sexism are asinine (I could use stronger language, but I won't), and I have seldom seen a more resounding confirmation of that belief.

Buoyed by this success, my next move was to make sure that all of my people started getting paid on time. Each week in the resume business you sent your receipts to corporate headquarters at close of business on Thursday, and were supposed to get paid based on your performance (salary plus commission or straight commission, depending on your contract) the following Friday. Unfortunately, this rarely happened; all too often the receipts did not reach corporate until several working days later, and the payroll department tended to sit on the checks anyway. I put a stop to this problem by getting the payroll people to FedEx the previous week's paychecks to me on Thursday, and then driving around the Region picking up the receipts and dropping off the paychecks in person each Friday. I would also drop off any supplies the service offices had requested on the same visit.

As a result, all of my people got paid on time, every time, and none of them ever had to wait for their supplies. This made me extremely popular with my people, as you might imagine. When I instituted vacations and sick days (which had never existed in the Company before) my popularity shot up so high I had people from other regions (including some in other parts of the country!) trying to transfer into my unit, and all of the other Regional Directors began having to institute similar policies just to keep from losing all of their best people to me. Within three months, my Region, which had been 26th of the 36 Regions in the company, was rated 2nd overall and 1st in productivity, making me one of the top Regional Directors in the company.

They weren't sophisticated moves. I had no formal training in business, and very little in leadership; other than a few years in student government during college, I had never led or managed anything. But I had learned from an early age that most people will respond to loyalty and fairness, and everyone appreciates being treated well. That's how I thought a business should be run, and when they gave me the chance, that's how I ran this one -- never guessing that doing so would be the start of a 20-year odyssey that would lead me through Corporate America, an MBA, management consulting, higher education and (starting this summer) a doctoral program in Management. And yet, somehow it all worked. The truism I coined that first year as a manager is still true today: "Take care of your people, and they will take care of you..."