Know Your Business to the Bottom

Recently a colleague for whom I have much respect was gracious enough to share a presentation about leadership and success in business he had been asked to prepare as part of a training program for future business leaders. The deck was great, full of outstanding advice of both the practical and philosophical variety. It was obvious the views expressed had come from hard earned experience, and not some fancy ivy league college business school or expensive training program available only to the elite, giving it a ton more credibility in my view. Of all the sage advice within one nugget really struck me. If you have not guessed by now, it happens to be the title of this post. It was framed as advice for how to succeed in business, but it has applicability across almost all areas of life.

This colleague had worked his way up through the business he now leads and so had seen its "bottom", and now sat at its "top." Knowing the bottom is not as simple as understanding what it is or what the roles are there, but the deep understanding that can only come from working in those roles. In any business, but especially in a complex technology and science heavy business, working in all the roles is invaluable in terms of understanding how the various parts work together to succeed or fail. Saying a given role is at the "bottom" is not a value judgement on its importance. Quite the contrary, these roles are often the most critical of all.

It is little appreciated fact that many businesses would run just fine without the "top" 10% of their leadership, but would collapse in hours or days without the so-called "bottom" 10% of key employees doing the actual work.

Bottom in this case only refers to the natural flow of work in the service industry in which we work. Those at the "bottom" are the first to "see" the work and the front-line people interacting with samples and customers every day. Some work in sample receiving, registering samples to be tested, others are in customer service and spend much of their time dealing with unhappy customers, and others are technicians who work at the bench, processing the samples we test. For those who have never worked in customer service and taken those calls it is very difficult, emotionally demanding, and often thankless work, but businesses live and die by the quality of it. In our industry the technicians at the bench often work in a production like environment. The work can be repetitive, and physically and emotionally draining. Sometimes it is not a lot of fun to put it mildly. Without firsthand experience doing those jobs, executing those activities, it is impossible to truly appreciate just how difficult and demanding they are. You can say you appreciate it, and you may even genuinely believe you do, but you are wrong. One must do the job, and do it for an extended period, not just a day or two, but weeks or months or even years to truly appreciate it. Very few have the patience or the guts to do this. My colleague had done it, and that is one of the reasons he has been so successful in his current role leading the business.

Of course, not everyone is going to be able to work their way up from the "bottom" of a given business, but every leader, no matter how new or how veteran, no matter in what role, can and should take the time to work as many roles in the organization as possible. I say as many as possible because, obviously, many leaders will not have the necessary skill sets to work all the roles, but if they can learn or be trained to do the work they should. To emphasize, I really do mean work those roles, not just fake it for half a day or a couple of days. Dedicate a month or six months or more to it. Work the hours those employees work, go to lunch with them, get drinks after work with them, be one of them. If you are going to lead them, a point this colleague makes in another part of his presentation, they need to respect you, and respect is earned. If they know you know what they go through daily, even if they don't like you, they can't help but respect you, and just as importantly, you will respect them. You will also learn very quickly who and where the weak points are.

If you do this, please don't pull a ridiculous undercover boss moves like the former television show of the same name. Trickery and deception work as badly in interpersonal relationships in business as they work in life. Apart from certain games of chance, and perhaps war, deception is generally a very poor strategy. That is a philosophical argument way outside the scope of this particular post but, my point is that if you are going to work those roles don't be a dick about it and try and deceive your coworkers with some made up story. Tell them what you are doing and why. They may think you are a dick in any case, and maybe you are, but eventually, if you do the job well, work hard and honestly at it, they will come to see that you are not a dick or maybe reinforce their opinion that you are, but they will respect you in either case.

Really my wise colleague's advice is just a slight twist on the age's old wisdom about the best way to understand someone being to "walk a mile in their shoes." There is a reason that advice has endured across the millennia, because it is true. It is also very simple and very easy to understand but very, very difficult to do. In that way it is a lot like many really good ideas. Easy enough to espouse and support, much harder to practice. My advice, exactly like my colleagues, is to practice it. If you want to succeed in business and life believe in it and do it.