On Leadership Development and the United States Naval Academy

[photo by afagen]

After a difficult few years in Bahrain, I have returned to the United States.

I now have the great fortune of simultaneously living in the most desirable city* in the U.S., working at a respected academic institution and being in a position of leadership and responsibility: AKA, my dream job.

I have recently taken an assignment as the Assistant Chair of the Department of Leadership, Ethics and Law at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

Ever since my undergraduate days at the University of Utah studying economics I’ve known I wanted to be in the academic environment. There’s something magical about the smell of chalk dust and the soothing tones of conversations about economic development and the economics of business growth.

It was years later however, while pursuing my degree in Global Leadership from the University of San Diego, that I really got excited about leadership as a subject and its role in international business economics. I read voraciously every book on leadership I could find and many books on economics as well.

Leadership training

Besides being the Assistant Chair, I will also be teaching leadership classes starting in the fall semester, which I’m anxiously looking forward to.

There’s little in life more gratifying than conducing leadership training with eager students.

Well, sometimes not so eager. It is the Academy after all.

But while it may be stressful for the students, life on the Yard is pretty sweet for the staff. You get all the pleasures of working on an historic and storied campus without the stress of being a midshipman.

And the campus is beautiful, with striking architecture, well-worn brick paths and gallant statues. All this amidst the serenity of tended lawns and majestic trees.

It’s a campus rich with tradition and ancient custom, and even though I did not attend the Academy as a student, I already feel a sense of pride and ownership in these rituals.

Or maybe it’s just a desire for ownership.

In any event, it’s a rewarding atmosphere that feels at once new and exciting but also familiar and soothing. Almost like coming home.

*Note: polling was non-scientific and contained only members of the Herdegen household.

More Proof I’m a Failure

[photo by Zanitha]

Well, I’m finally gone. Left my old job for the next one.

It’s been coming for some time, everyone knew it, and now it’s finally over. What feedback can I take from this experience? What bits of wisdom can I internalize so I don’t make the same mistakes again?

My boss would have me believe I’m a worthless individual. Would never do business with me in the future; would probably prefer I never worked again in any capacity. In his opinion I’m a net drain on society’s resources. If I were to internalize his entire final assessment of me I should commit suicide so as to incrementally improve the economy or at least become a self sufficiency farmer, someone out of the mainstream but not sucking up other people’s productivity.

But I can’t help thinking there’s another interpretation.

Maybe what I should take away from this is that my boss is a moron; or at least he’s too caught up in his egotistical self-centered empire to provide an accurate picture of my value to the world. After all, my immediate supervisor thinks I rock and my coworkers love me. So when it comes to an assessment of my abilities who should I trust?

In the first place, I’ll readily acknowledge it’s easier to impress coworkers since they don’t have the inherent superior/inferior filter that gets in the way of boss/employee relationships. But they do suffer if I slack off because it shuffles more of my workload onto them so in some sense they are the initial barometer of poor work performance.

I know my mother always thought I did a great job. When I look back over my performance, and the various people who have given me feedback, I see there’s a pattern that emerges.

Other people’s opinions have more to do with themselves than with us.

Yes, that seems egocentric, but that’s how we’re made. I am not equipped to give you an accurate evaluation of who you are, I can only tell you how I feel. Likewise, anyone who gives me feedback is inherently saying, this is how you make me feel. But they disguise it as an unemotional, authoritative assessment.

“I have looked over your work in an unbiased way and based on my intelligence and wealth of experience I can judge your contribution to society to be worthless.”

More importantly, can any assessment encapsulate our entire past or future performance? When my boss is convinced I’m a loser, does that mean everything I produced over the last two years was worthless, or does he just mean it’s all been substandard, or just not up to his standards? Maybe there’ve been periods of great performance interspersed with very poor performance?

I think it has more to do with the fact I made him the butt of my stand-up routine at the company Christmas party. And while that may have been a poor career move, it did bring the house down.

I guess what I’m saying is, he might have had a personal grudge. Maybe his feelings were based more on his personal disapproval of my comedic abilities than on my work performance.

So, how does his feedback help me know what was good or bad about my abilities?

It doesn’t. It just lets me know in aggregate I failed to impress one person. And that’s the problem with criticism; no matter how much we want it to reflect reality, it’s doesn’t. The person giving the criticism, regardless of position, social status, or authority, can only give a highly biased and limited opinion.

And no single word, or sentence or paragraph can capture our value or encapsulate our abilities. It is a snapshot, frozen in time. A biased, self-centered, highly subjective and often incorrect picture that is purported to be who you are. It is not.

The unfortunate corollary to that is also true; the same thing goes for praise. Don’t take it too much to heart, it’s still just one person’s biased opinion.

In the end, for good or bad, the feedback I receive from each person, regardless of rank, is just one data point.

You Don’t Know Your Own Weaknesses

[photo by DeaPeaJay]

My grandfather owned a farm in Cheboygan, Michigan and during the warm summer days when we got tired of watching the hay dry we would go to the beach.

Several years ago I was back at a beach near Mackinaw with my family. I was enjoying the relatively warm and sunny weather (this is Michigan after all so I have to caveat warm) when a high pitched voice caught my attention and I noticed a young girl having trouble staying afloat. I consider myself a pretty strong swimmer and being near the water already, I swam out to rescue her.

I learned several things that afternoon:

1. Swimming in a hurry takes much more time and energy than one would think.

2. While it may be easy to keep ourselves afloat, we’re only about five extra pounds from being submerged.

3. People who think they’re going to die are not reasonable.

She turned out to be a fourteen year old girl who had ventured too far out and could not keep herself buoyant. While swimming out to her I could tell she thought her life was in danger and that made me want to get to her quickly. But even at top speed it seemed as though I were merely crawling along the surface of the water.

I have had this feeling several times since and not only while swimming. It comes from underestimating the amount of effort a task will require. As a general rule I would say double the amount of time you think you’ll need for unfamiliar tasks. This does not just mean tasks you’ve never done before. I had been swimming many times, but I had never been swimming in a hurry over a measurable distance so I didn’t realize how long it would take.

Another thing I never thought about while swimming was just how close my mouth and nose were to the water line. Like most things in life breathing in water has the appearance of a binary situation: you can breathe or you can’t. So when I could breathe I didn’t think about how close I was to being unable to breathe.

What I didn’t realize therefore was the only two places I could breathe from, my mouth and nose, are very close together and only inches away from the water level. And while I was buoyant enough to breathe when left alone, even a small amount of additional weight, like a teenage girl trying to keep her face out of the water, and my body sank two or three inches deeper into the water effectively causing me to be unable to breathe.

This has manifested itself in my business life as shallowness of knowledge. I may be all right discussing things on a superficial level but may be only two questions away from looking like a complete idiot. Most of the time I don’t, so I feel safe, just as I felt safe swimming, but given a little extra weight I could be submerged. Now I try to bone up on information even when it is unlikely to be asked for just so I have the security of knowing I’ve got plenty of buffer.

Lastly, people don’t want to die. I know this. In fact, I knew from my Boy Scout life guard merit badge training that drowning people will panic and sometimes pull you down in an effort to save themselves. I knew this but I’d never experienced it. It was an eye-opener to say the least. The panic in this girl’s eyes, the amazing strength of her grip, the speed and desperation with which she acted was shocking. I was caught completely off guard.

I have sensed that same panic in the business world. Not the same wild look in people’s eyes, not the same crazy, adrenaline fueled grip, but the same essence of desperation. Never underestimate what a person will do when they’re in this state. They’re not worried about you. They’re not thinking about the future. They’ve got one thing on their mind and it’s survival.

If you’re ever put in a position to help someone in need by all means do it. It’s a great feeling to help someone in danger. But don’t overestimate your strengths and underestimate your weaknesses or you could both end up in need of help. So here are some takeaway points:

Practice using your skills in a way that simulates the real world conditions in which you may have to use them.

Give yourself a buffer by building a deeper level of knowledge than you think you’ll need.

Don’t rely on people who are desperate for survival themselves, you never know what they’re going to do to save their own life.

But the real bottom line is: Don’t hang out near weak swimmers.

How I Raced a Train and Lost

[photo by SP8254]

I grew up in a small town in northeast Ohio. Our primary form of entertainment in the winter was throwing snowballs at passing cars and in the summer riding an inner tube down the Cuyahoga River. My friend Matt lived at the top of a small rise and the road sloped steeply downward as it approached the bridge crossing the Cuyahoga. On the other side of the bridge, the road crossed a set of railroad tracks before heading back uphill into downtown Kent.

One afternoon Matt pulled ahead of me as we rode our bicycles toward downtown. In the mind of a teenage boy that could only mean one thing, we were having a race. I immediately began to pedal harder and as we both picked up speed on the downhill I pulled alongside him. I knew he would be thirsting to overtake me so I didn’t let up; without looking at each other we increased our tempo in unison. And then we heard the whistle of an oncoming train.

It was still out of sight to our right, hidden by trees but we knew it was close. We flew past the library and didn’t slow down as we crossed River Street. By now we could see the train approaching and the caution gates came down across Main Street as the lights flashed their warning in time with the clanging bells. Matt eased up as he took in the situation but I maintained my momentum from the hill and watched the train close on the intersection.

I was actually thinking quite clearly. I was no longer interested in beating Matt; I wanted to beat the train. I knew it would not take long for me to stop if I needed to so I began to estimate the closure rate of the train on the intersection comparing it to my own, and all the while keeping in mind the point at which I needed to commit to the crossing or begin braking in earnest. I was neither panicked nor worried, merely curious about the outcome.

Can we view ourselves objectively?

There were cars lined up on both sides of the road and as I moved into the left lane it became apparent to the oncoming cars I had no intention of stopping. They began honking their horns wildly. The conductor, too close now to stop in time, pulled his whistle in one long, continuous blast. I was committed now to crossing the tracks and pressed on. In a moment it was over, I flew across the tracks and the train rumbled loudly past.

On the other side people were angrily yelling at me from their cars. They appeared to be quite agitated, which made me wonder what they had to be concerned about. After all, none of them were going to get hurt if I didn’t make it. Nevertheless I felt chastened and waited for Matt just around the corner of Water Street, out of sight so as to not inflame anyone’s ire.

When Matt rounded the corner he was shaking his head but he had that silly grin he got whenever I did something dangerously funny for his benefit. That’s what I was waiting for. That was the payoff. Those angry motorists could hang themselves, at that moment I was happy to see Matt laugh. But that was the relationship we had; Matt needed to be entertained and I needed to be appreciated. It was a dysfunctional relationship but a comfortable one.

It’s this memory and others like it that make me chide my younger self, what were you thinking? As if somehow I’ve moved past such craziness, that somehow my maturity guarantees me freedom from idiocy. If I’m honest with myself I have to admit I still take unnecessary risks in the name of entertainment or for a challenge or to impress those whose opinions I value. I still make asinine investments in products, ideas, and people.

Was it worth it?

The phrase that keeps coming back to me when I consider the risks that didn’t pay off is: Was it worth it? Not as in, was it worth it to race the train and win, but as in, would it have been worth it to have raced the train and lost? Was the thrill, or victory, or praise worth the risk of dying? The problem is, you can’t ask that after the fact. Once it’s over it simply is what it is, there’s no decision to be made. The question needs to take place before the attempt and the answer needs to consider the cost. The answer needs to be true regardless of the outcome.

You can’t attempt something and say later, when things don’t turn out well, it wasn’t worth the effort. The effort is not expended only in the event of a win, the effort is expended for the chance of a win and winning or losing has no bearing on the appropriateness of the cost.

The moment I decided to race the train I both won and lost to some degree depending on how you want to calculate the odds. If there were a 95% chance I’d make it*, the moment I committed to the attempt I committed to losing one time in twenty. For every twenty people who attempt to beat the train one of them won’t make it.

(*This is an arbitrary number for illustrative purposes only. I have no idea what the actual chances of getting hit by a train are.)

For this one person, the failure was realized but every one of the twenty had the same chance of failing. And at the moment those twenty boys started riding toward twenty trains we have no way of knowing which one will be the unfortunate one. So the expected benefit must be worth it for both success and failure at the moment of departure.

The moment I decided to race the train I both won and lost. But only the win was realized.