In the Company of Heroes:
Life-Shaping People, Life-Changing Moments
by
Dr. Woody Sears
SMASHWORDS EDITION
PUBLISHED BY
Dr. Woody Sears.
Design/editorial Support by
PleasantValleyPress.net
In the Company of Heroes:
Life-Shaping
People,
Life-Changing Moments
Copyright © 2011 Woodrow Sears
Smashwords Edition License Notes
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Author's Note:
If you're reading this, you owe someone back there a debt of gratitude for the advice, counsel, and concern-for-your-future invested in you. If someone cared enough about you to celebrate your successes but to be brutally honest when you screwed up, to refocus you when you lost your bearings or to kick you in the ass when you allowed a sour impulse to override your common sense, you were lucky. You are living well today because someone, maybe several, became your mentor for a moment, a month, or for years. I am remembering my mentors with the hope that it will prompt you to remember yours—and your obligation to pass along to others those gifts that can only be repaid in kind.
My obligation here is to express my appreciation to Steve Kayser, editor of the business e-journal Expert Access, published by the pioneering business-software firm, Cincom. (Please see link under About the Author at the end of this book.) Each of the 13 articles that follow were originally published in Expert Access, and are presented here with permission. As a free publication, do share these stories, but please be careful to ensure that attribution is given to Cincom Expert Access in the event of inclusion in published or copyrighted material.
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Contents
Chapter 1. Choose your way forward carefully
Chapter 2. King Coal was King Kong
Chapter 3. You Learn to Untangle Yourself
Chapter 4. If You Don't Ask, You Don't Get
Chapter 5. You Learn to Yield … to Heal
Chapter 6. Resistance and the Process of Change
Chapter 7. You Can Ask—I think I want to do what you do…
Chapter 8. Look Close—You Learn Unconditional Truth Telling
Chapter 9. Life is a Long and Winding Road
Chapter 10. The Moment You Decide What You Do Makes Difference
Chapter 11. Laughing, Learning, Leadership, and Leprechauns
Chapter 12. If You Aren't Contributing to the Success of Those Around You, You're Wasting Your Life
Chapter 13. How Mentoring Really Happens
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Choose Your Way Forward Carefully
Jerry Edwards was the most unusual of my mentors. He was my parents' age and friend, and the first adult I knew who was unemployed more often than not. But because he was between jobs when I was house-bound during my 17th summer following a head injury, he launched the most important tutorial of my life.
He taught me how to think.
It was the Socratic method, instructor to student: What do you think about...? Why do you hold that opinion? Why do you think it matters? What would you do if...? Why would you choose to do that? What do you think would be the right thing to do if...?
The conversations always came down to ethics, fairness, decency, and simple honesty. The remembered lesson was that if you really think issues through, you will have to confront that most fundamental question, “What is the right thing to do?”
And that was the key to Jerry's status as a man who couldn't keep a job. He chose not to do things he considered wrong, or somehow in violation of the rights of others. Though he nearly completed a university education, he chose to be an enlisted man in WWII, leaving for others the decisions he knew he would not want to make. His happiest job was driving a truck between New York and Chicago, and his worst decision was leaving the highway to accept a huge raise as editor of a trucking-industry magazine. The bosses and the pressure to promote issues that he considered against drivers drove him out of that job.
By that time, with seven years of work experience behind me, I could identify with some of the workplace situations Jerry mentioned, and with the idea that there are things that people shouldn't be asked to do to others, or accept when done to them. The consequences of that principled programming when I was 17 were not always positive. When I was nearly 50, my wife raged at me, “The next time you feel a need to be so (expletive deleted) ethical, you might remember that we have a mortgage to pay!” And when I was nearly 70, I left a university and the income it provided because I wouldn't change grades for lying, lazy students, despite (and partly because of) intense pressure from deans, a pro-rector, and the rector. I will never forget the rector's words: “You're just being stubborn.” And my response: “I'm losing respect for you. I can no longer contribute to your success, so I'll resign.”
Was that the right thing to do? The smart thing? Was it arrogant? I know how Jerry would respond, because he, more than anyone else, programmed me for truth-telling, consequences be damned.
For years, I never returned for a family visit without spending at least several hours with Jerry, perched on a stool at his kitchen counter, a bottle of Irish whisky between us. The dialog continued, about people we were proud to know and about behavior that was embarrassing. During those later years, Jerry was maintenance superintendent for a residential complex, and it was in that role that he defined himself in the eyes of his long-suffering but adoring wife. Marie remembered their Christmas dinner was tuna casserole instead of turkey.
“It was Christmas Eve, and as Jerry left his office, he found one of his crew, a black man, weeping in the parking lot. He didn't have enough money to buy food for his family's Christmas dinner. Jerry had $20 in his pocket, and he gave the man half of it. Jerry didn't come home with the turkey we'd planned, but canned tuna made it a special celebration anyway.
“Jerry couldn't resist helping people whose need was greater than his own.”
Now that I'm teaching ethics, I look back on those early lessons and the prices paid between then and now for doing what I thought to be the right thing. I have a rich repertoire of examples to share with students. I never speak of morality. Jerry would not have accepted that. Instead, I describe the chances to choose that confront us as we go through life—everyday opportunities to vote your conscience.
As Jerry Edwards told me, you can't blame people for not making distinctions between right and wrong if they've never learned the difference. If they know and choose the low road because they fear the consequences of the high road, you must pity them. And finally, when people know the difference and don't care about the harm they do to others, avoid them at all costs—they will steal your soul as well as your money and your labor. There are a lot of them, he said, squatting on the side of life's road to take advantage of people as they pass. It was a useful warning.
Choose your way forward carefully.
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In the Company of Heroes: King Coal was King Kong
Martin L. “Red” Cooper, whom I met while on a hunting trip, spent his entire life in Davis, West Virginia, except when he went to WVU in Morgantown and to the South Pacific in WWII. He was a rancher, wore western boots and a battered Stetson, raised cattle and sheep and grain to feed them over the winter. He also ran a restaurant he bought to provide a place for his alcoholic brother to work. He was a man of many talents but few passions—chief among them his love of the Canaan Valley and his State of West Virginia.
His enemy was “King Coal,” the well-financed political machine that permitted land-scarring strip mining, without concern for the destruction of the ecosystem or revenue to the state. Red showed me ugly landscapes, barely hidden behind lines of road-side trees, and the poisoned streams, ruined homesteads, and highways crumbling under the constant pounding of overweight coal trucks. He was the first citizen-activist I knew, and he introduced me to the reality of environmental degradation with close-up views of destroyed landscapes.
Red saw the pillaging of his state by the coal barons, but never thought that coal mining should be stopped. What he wanted was for mining companies to clean-up their messes—and to pay the state a severance tax of at least a nickel per ton. Red's recurring refrain was, “That would make West Virginia one of the richest states in the union, with the best roads and schools and hospitals.” How does one man fight the machine?
After returning from WWII, Red made pilgrimages to the state legislative sessions in Charleston with a case of Virginia Gentleman, walking the halls in hotels where legislators stayed, pouring drinks for any he met and pitching the idea of only a nickel a ton. “But how could I make a difference with a case of whiskey when the daughters of those legislators were driving Ford convertibles to WVU, courtesy of King Coal?” The process of co-option went beyond legislators and their families, of course. When I went hunting with Red in Wyoming, one of his friends, a coal company executive, was there at the lodge. His guest was the State Police sergeant in charge of truck weight enforcement.
None of this was new nearly 40 years ago, or limited to West Virginia. When I was sales director at the headquarters hotel of North Carolina legislators, I organized the Sunday night buffets paid for by the trucking association. They provided the “hostesses.”
Finally, in 1972, the West Virginia legislature imposed a severance tax on coal. Red celebrated! Who knows? Perhaps his treks to Charleston had mattered after all. Maybe he softened the resistance of legislators for whom drinks had been poured in hotel hallways by a citizen activist who wanted nothing for himself—just economic equity for the people of his state. Not surprisingly, the severance tax has supported a transformation in that beautiful corner of America.
But in the contemporary cynical lexicon, no good deed goes unpunished. Several years after the legislative victory. Red's wife, Ida, serving as the mayor of Davis and a leader in the town's development as a ski and recreation resort, was kidnapped and murdered by an escaped convict. I returned for the funeral from San Francisco and shared a last drink with my good friend and mentor, Red Cooper.
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You Learn to Untangle Yourself
Joe Reed became a friend, mentor, and eventual colleague when we met at a month-long school for consultants in the summer of 1967. He had white unruly hair, a cherubic Irish countenance, and a mind like a steel trap. He was an attorney who had been on the fast track with an international consulting firm until his wife, mother of their seven children, had a nervous breakdown. Part of her recovery required his being at home more often, so Joe ducked into a job on Werner von Braun's staff in Huntsville. Part of his role became that of translating von Braun's Teutonic brusqueness into terms acceptable to the hill people of Alabama who assembled the rockets he envisioned.
Make it Better ... or Quit Wasting Our Time
Naturally, Joe's energies led to involvement with the community beyond the Proving Grounds, and one of his remembered encounters describes both much of his philosophy and the cut-to-the-chase consulting style Joe employed. As he told it, the setting was a meeting between residents of a public housing project and officials from the city. The health director was lecturing to the assembled residents about environmental hygiene when he was interrupted by a large woman sitting in the back of the room. “Doctor, we don't care about the clutter. What we cares about is the people. If you can't talk about the people and how to make things better for them, then quit wasting our time!”
Just Looking Can Be a Plan
By 1970, Joe had transferred to the Department of Labor in DC. He invited me to join him in a high-conflict project involving an overbearing bureau director and his 12 regional managers. It was essentially a rebellion-in-process, led by a regional manager who was as physically imposing as the director—both men were well over six feet tall, with athlete physiques. Joe was asked to intervene before administrative changes had to be made. A couple of preliminary interviews with regional managers and a meeting with the director resulted in an agreement for a management retreat at a golf club on St. Simons Island. Joe's plan? “We've got to get those very bright guys to take a look at their behavior.”
We spent an entire half day developing a 12-item interview protocol, then got on planes to travel to the regional offices to conduct the interviews. Back in DC, I edited the managers' responses, careful not to change meanings but to make it difficult to identify individual responses. Then all responses were listed in the same order—that is, respondent #6 was the sixth for all 12 questions. That made it easy for respondents to find their own comments, and to track others' comments for consistency.
We're Worse Than We Thought
The retreat began with drinks and dinner, and none of us had ever attended an event so fraught with tension—more like a street corner stand-off between competing gangs. But dinner passed uneventfully, and we followed with a short film and discussed collaboration, communication, and team effectiveness. The real action began the next morning. We sent the director out to hit golf balls, and passed the interview results to the regional managers. They read for a couple of minutes, then one broke the silence by saying, “We're worse than we accuse him of being!” Reading and re-reading continued for another hour, then Joe asked, “What do you want to say to your boss?” The next couple of hours were spent developing a presentation backed by many pages of flip-chart sheets.
The director was asked to return, and some said they saw tears in his eyes at points in the presentation—and not only in his! The rest of the day turned into a very productive work session. But best of all, everyone stayed in their roles and a year later, the bureau was praised for its accomplishments and exemplary teamwork.
Untangle Yourself
What a lesson! Competent adults can get tangled in an interpersonal forest from which they can no longer see the trees or themselves as complicit in the resulting mess. BUT—when given an opportunity to view their behavior without judgment or defensiveness, they can focus their competence on solving problems they could not previously confront. And, as a surprise to many, such positive accomplishments are possible without resorting to the heavy-handed use of authority. Authority is increasingly irrelevant, beginning at least thirty-plus years ago.
This was one of my gifts from Joe Reed, and I pass it along to you.
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If You Don't Ask, You Don't Get
I often smile when I remember being a Marine. Not the emotion most people would expect.
Instead of going to Fort Sill, Oklahoma to artillery school, I asked for a few hours off to find a better job. My company commander regarded me with a curious mixture of disdain, contempt, and amusement. “Yeah. Sure. Let me know what you find.” So I drove into the main base and went to the Landing Force Development Center, just like I knew what I was doing, and found the Publications Branch. The major there was amazed. “You mean you worked on a college paper and as a reporter and weekend editor on a real newspaper? Where were you hiding? We couldn't find you through Headquarters Marine Corps. We need an editor right now. When can you be available?”
When I got back to The Basic School, I reported to my company commander. He was incredulous when I told him my orders would be changed. That just didn't happen. “Yes sir, captain. The major said he'd call you first thing in the morning.” And that was one of the first and best lessons: Even in the Marine Corps, if you don't ask, you don't get.
The next lesson involved something more subtle: Don't want what you don't need. I was at my desk, filling out a long form when the major walked in. “What's that you're filling out?”
I looked up proudly and said, “It's the top secret clearance form, Sir.”
“Tear it up!” he barked.
“Sir?”
“I said tear the ********* thing up!” And so I did.
And then, “Sir, may I ask why?”
And here was the gift: “We don't have anything around here that's top secret. Let Lt. Hodges get the clearance. He's eager!”
Several months passed, and it was one of those rotten days on the Potomac River when the wind blows the rain horizontal. I looked out the window, and there was Lt. Hodges, striding into the wind, holding onto his hat with one hand, the top secret pouch manacled to his other hand. I made a cup of coffee with extra care, splashing in a little Scotch from the file cabinet, and took it to the major.
“What's this for?” he demanded, catching a whiff of the adjustment.
“I just saw Lt. Hodges, sir, outside with the top secret pouch. Thank you very much, sir!”
The major and I both worked for a remarkable manager, Colonel O. F. Peatross, a bona fide hero who had been with Carlson's Raiders in the daring 1942 submarine-based raid on Makin Island.
He had come to the Publications Branch as commanding officer and with a team of senior officers to lead development of Fleet Marine Force Manual 21, Anti-Guerilla Warfare. It would be the first such document published in the U.S. and the first copy off the press was hand-delivered to President Kennedy by the Commandant of the Marine Corps, David Shoup. (General Shoup advised Kennedy not to go into Vietnam.) One day, Col. Peatross gave me an early version of the FMFM-21 manuscript and told me to distribute it to the writers and what to ask of each of them. And here is the lesson. It's about delegation: Since I was just a lieutenant having to deal with very senior officers, Col. Peatross chartered me to act in his name. “If any of these people give you any trouble, refer them to me!”
I asked the colonel once when he would make general. He laughed and said he'd been too honest too often with too many people, but he retired with two stars.
Among those senior officers with whom I worked, Lt. Col. Robert H. Barrow was another decorated hero who would earn more medals in Vietnam and retire as Commandant of the Marine Corps.
A true son of “the Old South” (Louisiana), he was polite and courteous in every instance, in every transaction with even the most junior enlisted staff. From him I learned that courtesy counts, and to be gentle in rebukes and generous in praise—in short, to be an officer and gentleman.
I was fortunate to have been in the company of these heroes.
Remember:
In the Company of Heroes ... courtesy counts. And if you don't ask, you don't get.
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You Learn to Yield ... to Heal
Mary T. Harrison was 45 when we met, and I was only 32. No matter! We were instant best friends, but never lovers. Even so, I learned lessons about love that have not been exceeded.
That was in the summer of 1967 at a month-long school for human resource consultants. Sunday, July 5, we and two friends spent one of the most special days of our lives spooking about the rock-bound coast of southern Maine in my Dodge convertible, a very long car, now a very long time ago.
We shopped along the way—tomatoes, berries, apples, and plums from roadside stands, and sliced meats, breads, and condiments from a deli. There was wine to chill in the icy water as we splashed quickly in and out and dried in the sun sitting atop a black rock. Hours later, we met more from our guru school at a dockside restaurant for lobster and laughter.
It was on the slow drive back to our Bethel base, top down, under an amazing canopy of stars, that I learned of Mary T's heartbreak, heartache, and hoped-for resolution.
Her husband and brother, both Air Force captains and friends, went up for a routine night flight. But well out over the desert, warning lights. Flame out! Bail out! Husband's parachute failed to open. Brother's apologies, tears of remorse, begging for forgiveness, failed to open her heart, locked tight for five years. But in two weeks, her brother would arrive.
Their shared hope was that the magic of Maine would provide a time and place to heal.
As a new best friend, I became a sort of emissary, meeting the brother and liking him, too. Gene was a pilot's pilot. You could see it in his walk, his posture, his clear-eyed certainty—about everything except his pending meeting with Mary T. We had drinks and dinner that night, and more drinks, Gene and Mary T both stiff, not quite comfortable. We agreed to meet the next day at two.
And we did, in a grassy field dotted with wild flowers, the three of us as I held their hands, offered a few words about caring and courage, about my affection for them both, and our shared hopes for their reunion. We three were dripping tears when I left them to mend fences on roads that were not mine to travel. They succeeded, talking for hours, rediscovering each other, pulling together interrupted bits of family histories, and maybe hundreds of other things I have no knowledge of. They succeeded.
When I met them late in the evening, I met different people. The tension in Mary T's voice and body were gone, and the lines and creases in Gene's face had softened, and they held hands as they laughed easily and smiled almost shyly at each other.
What I saw was the result of a healing, a yielding to the power of love, a transformation of deeply wounded people who had lost each other and each finding in the other all they had hoped, and more. I didn't stay long with them that evening and Gene left several days later as did we all within a week. I never asked about their talk and never knew any details – but I saw the results.
We tried to stay in touch cross-country, but as busy professionals we lost each other as we all lose things and people in our careless, hurried ways of churning through life. No contact for years, until one night, changing planes in Denver, I found Gene by phone. "Didn't you know? Mary T passed on several years ago. Lung cancer. Slow." I could hear him weeping. I apologized, stammered out my condolences, wished him well, and hung up. Then, I sat in a corner of the Red Carpet Club and wept as I hadn't for years, regretting the carelessness that prevented my saying goodbye to a beloved friend, when a voice from the past might have mattered, and for the loss of an important mentor. Through her, I learned that love does indeed have the power to heal, though I never again saw it so clearly as back then.
“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
— Robert Frost
I still think of her, and always when I light candles to remember lost friends and family. She is standing beside that yellow 1965 Dodge convertible with the top down, wearing my jacket, a towel around her neck, her dark hair wet from a swim, and I feel the tears rise again.
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Resistance and The Process of Change ...
Prof. Edgar J. Boone is acknowledged as one of the prime movers in America's important community college movement, and he opened the door to a career of unimagined challenges and opportunities for me. When he arrived at N.C. State University to launch an educational revolution, with his colleagues Emily Quinn and Robert Dolan, he set up shop across the hall from the office in which I edited publications for the N.C. Cooperative Extension Service. After the Marine Corps, I had trouble with the advanced-clerk roles civilian employment offered, and I went through 2 jobs in 12 months before landing the editing job, which I enjoyed. But it wasn't challenging, and Ed Boone's program was.
Different in an Indifferent Kind of Way
Ed was kind to allow me into his graduate program. My undergraduate record was proof that I had been an indifferent student. Actually, I hated school from the first grade on—and only the threat of the draft kept me in college. But Ed's program ignited my imagination, and I have never since been so excited! Finally, school made sense, learning was fun, and studying with other adults was an enriching, electrifying experience. I was practically intoxicated and impatient for more learning. I quit the editing job, became a full-time student, and taught myself to speed read so I could get more faster. It was an amazing time for me!
The Process of Change
Unfortunately for Profs Boone, Quinn, and Dolan, their program was parked in a hostile domain presided over by a regressive aggie dean who created a web of bureaucratic obstacles to block the “radical” program. (Despite my grades, he kept me on academic probation until three weeks before I completed the M.Ed. requirements.) But as I tried to discuss the dean's obstructionist behavior, Ed just said, “It's part of the process of change.” In fact, he expected it, and I began to understand resistance to change, and to see the reality of processes within processes that are the framework of the dynamics of change.
Meanwhile, Ed's program was attracting an interesting mix of people who would soon be filling leadership roles in new community colleges around the state to support an ambitious, but largely unknown plan to have post-high school education within 100 miles of every student in North Carolina. But my interests were further afield, based on discovering management consulting and organizational development as professional options. So when I completed Ed's program (actually, the first student to do so), I headed north to DC, The George Washington University, and Len Nadler's doctoral program. In Human Resource Development. My excitement was maintained and even accelerated. But Ed Boone and company continued in my life.
Management vs. Design
Zoom ahead a few years, living in San Francisco, and I get a call from someone inviting me to pinch-hit for a sick lecturer in a project management seminar. What's project management? A brief explanation allowed me to say, “I think I know something about that.” And by surprise, Ed Boone, Emily Quinn, and Bob Dolan re-entered my life as I discovered that I had been deeply schooled in project management by the three of them. Interestingly, I've spent most of the intervening years writing and lecturing on project management and developing systems in public- and private-sector organizations. But that terrific trio never mentioned project management—they talked instead about the theory and practice of program design, and always with the planning and management of change as the reason.
There's something more basic behind all this—and even more important than change and community colleges and project management. That's community involvement and development, and the conceptual tools, proven organizing strategies, and interpersonal skills that make such social engineering possible.
Authoritarian Structures of Corporate Life
The authoritarian structures of corporate life could be ventilated with some of these ideas to provide more cost-effective, profitable operations. Not likely to happen this year, either—authority is easier to model and replicate, and requires a lot less thinking and planning.
But if community building is something you want to do, check out Ed Boone's Department of Adult and Community College Education at N.C. State University in Raleigh.
Probably someone there can get you started.
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You Can Say – I Think I Want To Do What You Do, But I'm Not Sure I Know What It Is
Edward A. (Tim) Murray, Ph.D., was a professor of textile chemistry who came to North Carolina State University as department chair. Since it was his first managerial role, Tim decided to get some professional training.
The American Management Association (AMA) was a reputable training provider, so he chose something called “laboratory training.” That turned out to be sensitivity training involving feedback from other participants on their perceptions of each other.
Tim was not pleased with much of the feedback he received.
He signed on with a therapist when he returned to Raleigh, North Carolina, and with the AMA feedback as a point of departure, he was able to integrate a number of behavioral and attitudinal changes. He reflected that it was not always pleasant, but not always painful, either.
Helping Others
As he neared the 18-month mark in his shrink time, two ideas began to take shape. First, that he wanted to help others as he had been helped; and second, that he had learned enough to do it. So, based on small income from some patents, Tim resigned from the university, rented a tiny office across the street, and began to make a difference in the lives of many people. Racial integration was new, and many religious and educational leaders, both black and white, felt unprepared to break out of their cultural boxes to lead effectively.
Learning While Doing, With Tough Love
Tim taught tough love to frightened people on their own turf, and celebrated with them the victories over their fears. He was rarely paid a fee, but passed a hat around for gas money. When he got corporate consulting, he hired a more experienced trainer to work with him. A tough and ethical man of the sort you don't meet often.
How To Talk to People
Tim was the first consultant I met. I was directed to his office by a fellow graduate student, and that first meeting literally changed my life. Tim laughed when I said, “I think I want to do what you do, but I'm not sure I know what it is.” I told him about the reading I had done, gave him a brief bio, and we talked for 45 minutes. He sent me away with a book (How to Talk with People, Irving J. Lee, Harper & Row, 1952) and invited me to return when I had read it. I was exhilarated when I left Tim's office! I felt I could float down to the street. Now, when people speak of having an epiphany, I know what they mean.
And Low Structure Learning
That was the first of many conversations, and barely two years later, I hired Tim (and his frequent co-trainer, Jack Hughes) to conduct a two-day lab during a training program for federal executives. I didn't know Jack, so I participated in his session while Tim worked with the other half of the class. Jack scared the hell out of me. He never said a word over the entire day! Tim laughed at my anxiety. (It was my first time as the program's manager!) All he said was, “That's Jack's style. You'll learn a lot.” And I did. We all did, and we continued “processing” our experiences late into the second night. In vino veritas worked. After two days of low-structure learning about ourselves and others, the sharing and caring that night is memorable across the years.
Authenticity Is A Work In Progress
I think Tim would laugh to learn that I haven't yet mastered authentic communications, but he would be pleased that I'm still working on it. Few of us do it perfectly, and that feedback can be a powerful tutor!
~~~~~
Look Close: In the Company of Heroes You Learn Unconditional Truth-Telling ... And It'll Cost You
Lee K. Buchanan, MD, was a galvanizing figure for me. I met him first when he came to Raleigh and North Carolina State University to make a presentation at the request of Clarence M. Ferguson, a former Asst. Secretary of Agriculture and an adjunct professor. (Fergie was another of my heroes.) Lee spoke to a packed audience of students and faculty in a large auditorium, and punctuated his tough message with topical humor. Specifically, he recalled some of his gaffes as the African-born son of missionaries discovering segregation in America; and as a physician who thought his role was to heal rather than to break people (as required by the CIA, his former employer). He also spoke out against the abuses against federal employees to get them to falsify figures to support administration goals. These were not things decent people did to others. His was an electrifying performance of tough messages riding on waves of self-deprecating humor. Everyone was moved—except a student colleague, a wanna-be nurse-educator who thought Lee was clinically deranged.
Of course, he wasn't. But as the medical director for the Department of Agriculture, his non-conforming ideas and comments kept him on thin-ice with his political masters. Before they fired him on a really flimsy pretext, I had the opportunity to work with him several times. He was an after-dinner speaker on the executive program I was managing. I encouraged participants to bring drinks from the bar, and to have a bar break instead of a coffee break. I wanted them loosened up to learn from the only professional man in their age group who would talk to them candidly about stresses to which they were subject, basing his comments on his own divorce, his daughter's suicide, and the political pressures on him to conform (shut up!).
Lee had the male-only participants on the edge of their chairs, leaning forward to not miss words, genuinely nice guys confronting things that were frightening, but unmentionable. After his presentation, Lee would join the guys in the bar, fielding questions like, “Doc, I've got a friend who ...” and “How do we deal with kids who ...?” These were powerful sessions. Maybe they even made a difference in the lives of some participants—at least no one ever complained about his humor, the content of his talks, or the bar-side debriefings.
The term “politically correct” hadn't been invented back then, but I was warned by colleagues not to get too close to Lee, that he was dangerous and unstable and a target for retribution by Secretary-level staff. It was interesting that no one said he was wrong—just foolhardy. When he was fired, as predicted, he went through a period of depression before hooking up with a medical center that allowed him to serve some non-rich patients. But I was fortunate to become an acquaintance, if not a friend, and we shared dinners at his home and mine before his second marriage and my first crumbled and sent us off in different directions.
Fortunately, we re-connected a dozen years later in California. Lee was doing his senior-friendly medicine (including house calls!) south of San Francisco and I was living on the coast to the north. He came to the party to celebrate my first book, and showed up for a surprise lunch the following year, heading up Highway 1 on holiday. That was the last time we met and he was, as ever, philosophical, enjoying his fire-proof role as a private-practice physician. “My patients aren't going to fire me. They say I'm the only doc in California who still makes house calls.”
It's surprising how often “the clown prince of medicine” shows up in my mind, but I can predict that when a show-down moment comes again and I have to tell the truth or pull some other stunt, Lee will be there in my conscience (along with my other heroes).
That kind of unconditional truth-telling has cost me some clients and some friends, but I wouldn't have it any other way.
~~~~~
Life is a Long and Winding Road
Ellen Edelston came into my life as a key person in one of the most powerful parts of my doctoral program. I was required to spend the equivalent of the classroom and study time of a semester course working with an organization very different from the one that employed me. My secretary, Ruth, was an active member of Parents Without Partners (PWP), and since I had no children and had not yet been divorced, PWP was as different an organization as I could have found. Ruth introduced me to a psycho-social universe I had never imagined—and to the leaders of a 7-chapter, 1400-member Washington-area organization.
I was welcomed enthusiastically, and asked to conduct a range of leadership training programs. Included were basic hosting skills for the men and women who held home-based social events somewhere in the DC area seven nights a week, and more traditional content for the chapters' elected leaders. I was surprised to find Ellen, a former neighbor, active among the leaders, and she became my guide and de facto client rep. I attended dozens of home-based meetings, discussion groups fueled by coffee and cookies with door fees of a dollar or less; chapter meetings; and even a dance party that produced all the nervous energy of a junior high school prom.
The training sessions commenced, and of course I involved Ellen and a number of other leaders as presenters, and positioned them as in-house resource persons to continue the training we began.
No training was ever more appreciated nor has my experience ever produced a more enthusiastic group of participants. PWP was a primary social outlet for most of them, and the opportunity to gain skills that could be transferred to their jobs was an unexpected plus.
Another unexpected turn was that Ellen, a therapist working in a public agency, discovered that the behavioral objectives of training, education, and therapy all are changed behaviors on the part of participants, students, and clients. That allowed her to release a considerable cache of skills so that she became a consultant and lecturer, and in return for her many favors to me, I was able to connect her with people who hired her as a presenter in their programs. It was exciting to see her evolve into a new professional dimension, but even so, why was she my mentor, instead of vice versa?
She was one of the last German children to escape from Nazi Germany, all her family among the disappeared as she went to a new life with Canadian Quakers. She won scholarships that took her to Bryn Mawr, that academic hothouse for women on the Philadelphia Main Line, and an MS in clinical psychology.
Her marriage resulted in two handsome sons, but the younger inherited his father's congenital heart deformity and died, too, during corrective surgery at the Mayo Clinic.
And there were the depressions she fought, triggered by the pettiness of her clinical colleagues and the trivialities that beset her clients. In an uncharacteristic outburst, she once raged, “What these people don't know! What they haven't seen! How can they be so totally self-involved, so infantile?” She was meeting the leading edge of the “me generation.”
Ellen and I had a last visit on my live-aboard boat in Sausalito, and I learned some months later that she was gone, a head-in-the-oven suicide.
That memory still haunts me, and returns when I am confronted with pettiness, the self-deceit of weak-willed individuals who become sink-holes for emotional energy, their own and others'.
My dear friend Ellen, RIP!
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The Moment You Decide What You Do Makes a Difference ... It'll Make a Difference in What You Do!
Marilyn Harryman's motto: “The moment you decide that what you do makes a difference, it will make a difference in what you do!” That's why she's been making a difference since the early sixties. Unlike others of us, she made her differences standing in the same place and facing enormous obstacles. Racial prejudice? Yes. Sexual harassment? Yes. Threats? Yes. That's a lot of hostility for anyone to confront. Why stay in an atmosphere of such enmity?
Because she thought it was temporary—that she would become a foreign ambassador or industrial psychologist. But circumstances found her teaching and counseling in an inner city school system that was turning black. She loved the responsive energy of the kids, discovered meaningful work, and stayed. She advocated opportunities for those whose futures were constantly being compromised—by their schools, in their homes, on the streets, and in the city and state education and budget offices. Her victories were small, one by one, but big in the lives of those she helped.
“I am only one, but still I am one.
I cannot do everything, but I can still do something
And because I can't do everything,
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”
– Edward Everett Hale
I heard her frustration about colleagues who might have supported her, but couldn't/wouldn't/didn't, constrained by issues of race, gender, or local politics. I saw a tremendous talent being used badly, and urged Marilyn to go where her professional and personal courage would be appreciated.
I pushed her, and almost went too far by calling her a “White Princess.” Mercifully, she understood my provocation and my motives, and didn't turn me out of her house or lock me out of her heart. Instead, she said, “I love what I do. I care about these kids. I know I can help remove some of the barriers in their way.” So I shut up, regretting her decision. But ... I underestimated her tenacity and resolve.
She survived difficult administrative changes and worked to serve the many students who were not getting support for success beyond high school. Where others saw difficult kids and often gave up, she saw her students as interesting and creative, just needing to learn how to connect with the majority culture through academic achievement, and to understand its basic work ethic.
To escape a regressive bureaucracy, she seized the opportunity to create and host a live, call-in, cable TV program to reach the entire city. CCC Live! The Counselor Community Connection, now in its 15th year, is produced and directed by talented students. The hour-long program features successful students, community leaders, and employers who provide information to which only the affluent usually have access. The emphasis is on helping students make informed choices that can lead to career and life success.
Along the way, Marilyn earned a second MA, in Career Counseling. She received national recognition as lead author and organizer of a comprehensive success guide to help students plan their futures. She has emerged as a counselor educator and one of the leaders of the school counseling community. She testifies before state and local legislative committees, arguing that providing professional counselors and programs as a regular part of the curriculum can help students become contributing, tax-paying citizens instead of welfare recipients.
Yes, she got the occasional student into prestige universities and military academies. But of more importance, she introduced the language of achievement and success into the vocabularies of thousands of students, teachers, and administrators, too. Even in retirement, which she calls “redirection,” she provides professional support to non-profit boards, shuttles off to Sacramento and national conferences, often at her own expense, to testify, to provide support, to teach, to train, to author, and carry the message that the final exams for schools are the achievements of their students as parents, employers, and citizens. This is why schools and kids need expert counselors, and the funding to support them!
This gifted, accomplished woman has been a role model, a mentor, a true-grit heroine, and my friend for 40 years. Want to know more? With her former students and clients as touchstones, she continues as a professional career counselor at the Bay Area Career Center in San Francisco. To check out the website, please see the link at the end of this book, in the About the Author section.
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Laughing, Learning, Leadership & Leprechauns
Robert L. (Bob) Stockment was as close to a leprechaun as anyone I've ever known. It wasn't that he was short, because he wasn't. It was more his smile, his laughter, his ability to be kind and gentle even in the midst of the most inconvenient muddles. He was the one, more than any other person, who taught me how to be a presenter, a public speaker, a lecturer. His message was simple: “People want to laugh, to be entertained, more than they want to learn. But if you can allow them to have fun, you will be amazed at how much they will learn.”
A number of times, participants have asked if I was a boxer, and when I can be scrupulously honest, I have to confess that I never was—but my mentor was! And like a duckling imprinting on the first thing it sees, I imprinted on Bob, his easy, expressive style, and his self-deprecating humor, and his way of moving among participants rather than standing behind or hanging onto a podium. I watched him lecture, I watched him sitting in circles with groups of executives, and the way he would reach out to include them in discussions and to support them when they participated. He was the instant friend, the good listener who made everyone feel comfortable.
When I met Bob, he was working for the Agricultural Research Service, recently returned from a stint in New York as an executive with a major organization for managers. He had liked the job, most of his associates, and the majority of the executives he met. But not his boss, who assigned to Bob the disagreeable collateral duty of finding women to be escorts and sleep-over companions for some of the visiting executives. So he returned to Washington and government employment.
One of his first assignments as training director for Agricultural Research Service involved enhancing the managerial performance of the Service's director. It was an assignment organized by someone very senior in the Department of Agriculture who saw a need, an opportunity for a solution, and made it happen.
The director, an MD/PhD scientist, came to their first meeting, wearing his white lab coat and carrying a clipboard. He was almost sarcastic when he threw down his gauntlet, the world-renowned scientist confronting a man with no academic credentials. “Okay, Bob, how are you going to make me into a better manager?”
In that beautiful way he had, of smiling and dropping one shoulder as though he was ready to fire a right hand to the body, Bob said, “Well, sir, the first thing you need to do is take off that lab coat. It identifies you as a scientist. It locks you into the safe role as a researcher, as an expert, as an authority. It causes the people who work for you to respond to you as a technical advisor. That keeps them from seeing you as an executive and it keeps you in the dance of pleasing them instead of providing direction for the growth and future of the Agricultural Research Service.”
The director looked at Bob, without moving, for nearly a minute. Then he shrugged, took off the lab coat, tossed it onto a chair. He sat down and asked, “Okay, Bob, what else do I need to know?” They did not need many such conversations, and as far as anyone could tell, the director never again wore the lab coat.
Early in his life, after an undistinguished stint in the Navy as an enlisted man, Bob worked on a lathe in South Bend, Indiana. He remembered “a nice kid” with a new degree in industrial engineering. One day, Bob saw the engineer coming through the plant with his boss. Bob pushed his stock bench several feet away so he would have to step away from the lathe to get new stock. Sure enough, the engineer spotted the extra steps. “Bob, wouldn't it be easier if you rolled the stock bench closer to the lathe? Then you could save those extra steps.” Bob expressed his appreciation for the suggestion and said, “Why didn't I think of that?” The engineer looked content as he and his smiling boss continued their tour.
Bob's lesson in these stories was that no manager wants to fail, and no one wants to work for a manager who is failing.
Employees in even the most menial jobs will help their managers look good and succeed—if only the manager will give them the opportunity and appreciate their integrity. Adversarial relationships at work are caused by managers who cannot allow workers to express their integrity and will not recognize the dignity of those whose tasks are menial and whose prospects are limited.
Bob's widow sent me his pocket watch, as he had directed, but he left me with so much more. With three academic degrees more than he had, I still struggle to be his peer.
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If You Aren't Contributing to the People Around You, You're Wasting Your Life
Ken Sowers was a warrior-priest.
Literally. He was ordained an Episcopal priest just as World War II began, and could have escaped military service. Instead, he joined the Army's chaplains corps and spent 20 of his 24 years in the army as a full colonel. Going up in the ranks quickly is not unusual in war time, but Ken's rise was spectacular, especially for a chaplain.
Ken wore a lapel device, a miniature of the French Croix de Guerre, awarded to him by General DeGaulle. I asked what he had done to merit such an honor. It had something to do with his efficiency—because Ken Sowers was the only warrior-chaplain in the European Theatre with his own Thompson sub-machine gun.
Ken wanted to become the army's chief of chaplains.
That ambition was blocked politically, but he was offered a promotion to general in the accounting corps. He left the army, earned a PhD in behavioral science, and connected with some academics to create Leadership Resources, Inc. LRI was one of the early behaviorally-oriented consulting firms.
I was excited to have been invited to become a junior associate in such a successful firm, and about the pay-for-performance contract. “If clients like your work, you'll be okay,” Ken warned. “If they don't, we'll starve you out of here in two months.” I survived, and was luckier still to have found a remarkable mentor and friend.
Part of that luck involved assignments that more senior associates refused, forcing the development of my interpersonal skills as I dealt with some of the more difficult clients. If I resisted, Ken would kick into his priest role, offering me absolution-in-advance for the sins of my choice for the next six months. I always accepted, and I always learned.
One of those assignments involved a succession of back-to-back, two-day conferences in Atlanta, Denver, and Los Angeles for a high profile government agency. I returned to Washington vowing never to work for that agency again. I told Ken about the executives partying late into the night, about the sweet stink of marijuana in the hotel hallways, about room service deliveries of bottles of Johnny Walker Black, each costing more than the government per diem we were allowed. A woman on our staff had been on the tour, too, and she confirmed what I reported.
The woman and I were stunned to see Ken call the politically-appointed director of the agency and chew him out, saying he should report the agency and the touring executives to the General Accounting Office and the FBI. He said, “Until I have your personal assurance that my people will never again be put in a position to have to witness such outrageous and unlawful behavior, LRI will no longer work for you!” A large and profitable contract could have been lost, but the agency director gave Ken his word that there would be no more misbehavior.
Ken then apologized to both of us and excused me from the meeting. From the other side of the closed door, I could hear him raging at the woman for not telling him about the misbehavior first, since she had returned to the office a day ahead of me. She got the same kind of high-energy warning the agency director had received, about ethics, duty, and company reputation.
The manager-as-warrior at work!
But among the best lessons were the late afternoon sessions with federal executives I was invited to attend, bringing a bucket of ice to Ken's office. He would produce glasses and a bottle each of Scotch and bourbon, and conduct a problem-solving session for the evening's guest. Sometimes the subject would be getting a promotion, designing a new program and a pitch for it to senior executives, writing a thesis for an academic degree, a difficult ethical problem at work, and sometimes painful family problems. Sometimes there were tears as repressed anger was released, and sometimes hilarity as a system-beating scheme evolved. Ken was the pastoral counselor, and I was usually just a fly on the wall, listening and learning.
The great lesson from those experiences was the message that Ken repeated often. I remember it every time I'm teaching or on assignment, and it has shaped my life:
If you aren't contributing to the success of the people around you, you are wasting your life!
My gift to you, passed along from my mentor, the Rev. Kenneth M. Sowers, Ph.D.
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How Mentoring Really Happens
Mentoring can happen in an instant, in a few well-chosen words, and initiate lasting and life-changing insights.
Two people who became my heroes are celebrated here. Who knows? Maybe you will hear what I heard, and the impact of their words will continue to ripple across time and space.
Lori Eisenberg was my first marriage counselor. It was our second meeting alone. Between the first and second, she had met with my wife and then with both of us. She opened the meeting with stunning directness: “What have you got against getting a divorce?”
I was shocked into speechlessness. Finally, I stammered, lamely, “Well, it would cost a lot of money.”
And here is her world-class, life-changing response: “So, go make some more!”
Talk about cutting to the chase, knocking off the nonsense, and getting down to making decisions! That's been more than thirty years ago, and the imperative to act, to decide, to quit equivocating, is still as powerful. I've remembered it at least weekly, and it has pushed me into maybe a thousand decisions. “So, go make some more!”
Her direct advice has been included in more than 200 lectures, and it's always a surprise to people who want to wallow in the clouds of high-level abstractions instead deciding to get out OR to stay-in-and-make-it-better. With all due respect to the semanticists, sometimes either/or is the only honest, courageous decision.
What a gift! I pass it along to you.
Fr. Joe Frazier, an Episcopal (Anglican) priest, was my second short-statement mentor. He had been nearly-famous as a member of the Chad Mitchell Trio. Their anti-establishment songs delighted Libertarians and those of the political left about the same time The Beach Boys and The Kingston Trio were enchanting the politically asleep.
He was making a pastoral call to my wife, who had terminal cancer. After suffering through three abdominal surgeries and three rounds of aggressive chemotherapy with attendant hair loss, she was angry and often lashed out. She looked at me, then at Joe, and like a verbal arsonist said, “I don’t think Woody is a Christian!”
Fr. Joe put out the fire in a six-word, world-class, life-changing response: “Is he taking care of you?”
I've spent at least a hundred hours thinking about that situation and the lessons implicit in it. His gentle way of cutting to the bottom line while bringing the single, most important issue to the surface, was a powerful intervention, worth studying, worth thinking about.
In another instance, Fr. Joe and I were discussing capital punishment. I was rolling out the usual pro-death-penalty arguments. Again, without heat, Fr. Joe changed my attitude, my values, and maybe my life with a few well-chosen words.
“I guess the death penalty would be okay if I could imagine Jesus pulling the switch. But I can’t!”
Of course, he was employing the rhetorical strategy of identifying an acknowledged standard to neutralize an argument, and it worked! I had to confront the duplicity in my values, and my trust in the man who had asked, in my behalf, “Is he taking care of you?”
These three interventions have been transformative. Each was weeks or months of tutorials distilled into less than a minute. They were clear, concise, and authentic; pointed, straight shots to the heart of the issue and to the heart of the recipient. They were as finely crafted as any piece of art, models of efficiency and effectiveness.
Where does the ability to speak in such succinct, truth-telling terms originate? My guess it's from integrating three separate skills: listening and attending acutely, reading the situational dynamics, and suspending judgment. Individually, these may be the most challenging of the interpersonal skills, and integrating them in a single moment is a great feat of personal discipline. But when it happens, magic moments are possible.
I’ve seen the magic, and I've struggled for the discipline to replicate it. When I've been able to make it happen for others, I feel that I'm at my best—and repaying a debt to two remarkable mentors.
Author’s note: This is the last of 13 recollections of some of the Heroes in my life. Thanks for sharing them with me, and I hope you will take a few minutes to visit with the Heroes in your life.
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About the Author
Woody Sears holds one of the early doctorates in Human Resource Development and has consulted in hundreds of organizations, as well as lecturing all across North America on project management. In addition to his other Smashwords titles, he is a regular contributor to Expert Access (expertaccess.cincom.com), and six of his books for managers were published in 2007-8 by Human Resources Development Press (www.hrdpress.com):
* Communicating with Employees
* Thinking Clearly
* Mastering the Manager's Job
* Creating a Winning Management Style
* Building a High-Performance Team
* Winning with People at Work.
LINKS
In Author’s Notes:
Cincom: www.cincom.com
ExpertAccess e-zine: expertaccess.cincom.com/
In The Moment You Decide What You Do Makes a Difference ... It'll Make a Difference in What You Do
Bay Area Career Center in San Francisco & Marilyn Harryman’s profile: www.bayareacareercenter.com.
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