Am I Really That Good?

Am I really a good manager at all or do I just tell myself that in the hopes that it is true? The answer to the question is the question itself. If you aren't asking yourself and those who report to you the question, then you may very well be just hoping.

The other day I taught my son how to mow the lawn. I showed him where to put the mower when you’re walking and how to start it up. I showed him how you make turns and clear room for yourself so that it all gets cut evenly. He was apprehensive at first but after a couple of rows or me correcting him and yelling out over the sound of the mower, I realized that he had it. I told him if he misses some blade of grass to go back over it and fix it and I walked away.

I turned around to finish trimming the edges of the lawn thinking to myself that it is his first time and if he misses some it is totally fine. I could fix it I thought. The important thing is that he feels good about what he is doing and that he feels like he contributed to the chores and the household. He knew and I knew that mistakes were absolutely fine and there would be no punishment or jeering by anyone if he had to go back to fix spots. I somehow had made the lawn a safe place where experimenting was totally fine and trial and error would end with the desired result of an even lawn.

After completing the trim and getting him started on the front yard I returned to the back to find the mistakes so I could direct him when he returned. But there were no mistakes. Just perfectly even lawn with no missed patches. Wow, it only took me two rows of grass to teach a rookie kid how to mow the lawn. My teaching skills must be on point. I must be that good that a ten year old could pick something up the first time. Well, I suppose he takes after his old man and my expert skills of lawn mowing.

After scanning the front yard and finding the same perfect results I told him that he did a fantastic job and that I was impressed. He told me about the satisfaction he got from making it all the same length and about the pride he had about using the mower for the first time and doing it correctly. He expressed that he would like to do it again next week as long as I pick up the dog poop prior. We laughed because that is usually his job before I mow and now the tables have turned in his mind.

The whole story seems like a mundane normal part of growing up. Then I realized that I could remember the first time my dad taught me how to mow the lawn. I remember the feeling of accomplishment when I was done. The pride I had felt at the approval of my father when his lawn was mowed. And, as I remember, it didn't take much effort on his part to get me going. Nor did it require much coaching as I went. But he surely wasn't that great of a teacher or even that nice of a person. In fact as years went by and other priorities crept up in my life, I can remember doing a poor job at the lawn. I left it looking half mowed and not nice at all as I ran around trying to get it done as fast as possible. No pride or desire to gain approval on the results.

What made me stray from the results that I so eagerly desired when I was first taught? How do you get worse after starting off the right way? Would my son do the same thing? Am I even that good or did my son do this on his own?

I probably over think things sometimes but in this case I believe this is the perfect microcosm for our everyday life at work. We are managers and employees of managers. A lot of what we do and the results tied to it has less to do with skill and more to do with desire to achieve the best outcome for the company, our boss, our department, and even our customers. So I drew two conclusions from this interaction to write about and apply as I move forward as a people and business manager.

First thought is that 10,000 hours is kind of BS. You hear this all of the time about how if you can do something for 10,000 hours that you will be an expert and will have all of the knowledge and skill needed to always be considered an expert. What if you were taught wrong and spend 10,000 hours missing a step. Would it take someone with 10,500 hours to identify your problem or would you have to start over? My son did it right in his first hour with minimal training so is he going to be even better at 10,000th time? Of course not. In fact, who am I to be teaching lawn mowing when my best guess is that I have spent probably less than 1,500 hours mowing lawns. What if they change how people can mow lawns? Does my 1,500 hours even count?

Look, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that experience doesn't matter, because it does. But it is definitely not the only thing that matters. Every week we hear about another industry that is being disrupted or about the end of how we used to do things. And at the same time we keep running into people, coworkers, bosses, and customers that want to preface their power with their 30 years of experience. 30 years ago they were on hour one of their career. Their mindset was different as well as the world around them. So while experience can help in some cases where things are the same, it really just means you have been surprised more times, disrupted more times, lost more times, and had to deal with it more times. So if anything experience shows perseverance and that is something that you cannot teach. But it isn't just what you lived through. It’s all the time you spent learning before you lived through it also. All the time you spent learning as you were living it.

So in the case of my son I learned a few things about experience. First is that I had more experience being a son than a Dad and that I taught him from that part of me. If I would have taught him how I was taught, then he would have been terrified of messing up. Second, was that he had study me mowing the lawn for years. Since he was three with his little plastic mower he watched and learned and knew all of my moves. So his first hour with the lawn mower was played out in his head for more than 7 years already. He knew what to do whether he was conscious of it or not. And third is he knew I cared more about him than the result being perfect. That made it safe and allowed him to do his first adult chore safely and effectively.

Thinking back to times when I have had my best results or have seen the best results by people I managed, we were on the same level. We learned from each other and from the work to get the best outcomes for the business. It didn't always work out but I always felt like I could try something or voice my opinion and fail without jeopardizing the relationships that we had created or the work we were trying to accomplish.

What do you want to accomplish as a manager? The best answer I ever heard was to work myself out of a job! That usually is taken in a negative way in that I want to be fired, but instead it means the exact opposite. I want to grow and empower my employees to do the things that I do today. I plan on continuing to develop and become smarter so it is a foregone conclusion that my skills will outgrow the work I am responsible for now. My learning will make a once complex task more easily completed by another. My better hiring processes will start to provide more capable workers with the knowledge to complete these now everyday easy activities. And if it goes right they will know more than me and push the business forward without my direct impact. Hence working myself out of a job.

The next lesson that I will share from this, is too often as managers we keep doing the "hard" stuff or tasks that we think require a more experienced skill set to accomplish. These tasks or responsibilities are assigned to us when they are perceived to have a greater level of complexity or are a bigger part of the success of the business. In other words, we hang on to them like a blanket because they made us feel smart and productive before even though our growing skills have surpassed them now.

You see better talent should scare you if you don't have it. If you do have it, then you need to step on the humble bus and start to learn and grow trust in your employees. This will allow you to transfer ownership of tasks and work so that you can focus on bigger and better things. If you work yourself out of a job how I have described, you will almost always have a better job with more pay and more responsibility as a result. You will have impacted the organization in ways that will help it sustain success over time. Just don't forget to teach those under you how to teach the next wave of employees the same way. You will have already modeled it for them, and they will naturally want to emulate it with those who report to them because of how good it felt for them. They will remember how satisfying it was for them. Today that means you will be teaching millennials how to teach millennials about empowerment and job satisfaction. Most of all, they will organically, and specifically, share their experiences and be a living example to a potential future with the company.

While my son finished mowing the lawn I worked on the trim, finished up some gardening tasks and finally got around to moving a wood pile I was asked to move months ago. I trimmed some plants and did a few other things that were lingering because of the time restraint mowing was putting on me. Once the task was delegated I had a clear vision of what else needed to be done. I also had time to think about what else I could accomplish so that the yard looks even nicer. It is a week later now and a few of those tasks are set in motion that may have otherwise been left for later.

So why am I writing this? Mainly because it was on my mind and I hope that I can impact someone with what I have learned. It could also be because the most obvious and annoying person in the room is always the person who believes they have achieved their 10,000 hours. Or maybe it is because we are all kids learning as we go. All I know is most managers have a manager who also has a manager. None of us have 10,000 hours managing others or 10,000 hours managing other managers.

My son is almost 11. After some expert calculations I realized that he has been alive for roughly 93,000 hours. Take away half for sleeping and you are at 48,000 hours. Take away another 22,000 for my work and an estimated 10,000 for travel and I am left with 16,000 hours of time that I could spend parenting my son. Cut that in half because of school activities and sports and I am down to 8,000 hours. So even if I spent every waking minute with him teaching him and parenting him there is no way that I could be an expert. This is my whole point. Just because my title is Dad, doesn't mean I am being Dad 100% of the time. I don't get credit when I am away or he is away or when his mom is parenting him.

So if you are an expert manager, I implore you to go back and check the math. Make the deductions for the time you screwed up. Remove hours for when you really screwed it up and set an employee back. Don't count the times you paid less attention or focused on someone or something else. Or just realize you have a lot to learn with each employee you come into contact with. If your industry is disrupted, cut your hours in half and start new. Nobody is able to keep up so just keep learning and applying. And maybe use yard work as meditation and reflect on how you can better apply what you know and identify where you can go to learn more of what you need to know. There is time, but not a lot so get after it already.

Future topic potential: I asked my son this week if he will be perfecting his newly found craft of mowing the lawn and he said sure if I pay him. I told him that it looked like he had fun last time and his comment back was this, " Yeah Dad, that was the first time, but now it will probably be boring so I think that I should get money to keep doing it for you." All I could think is we are worried about millennials and this is what is coming right after them. I think I might invest in a robot mower.