Leading With Feeling

"Tom was a young engineer employed at one of the country's largest steel companies. He had been an outstanding individual performer, and now he was a new manager, leading a team responsible for producing steel for a major automobile company. After just one week on the job, Tom and his team met with over 20 engineers from that other company. It was a rude awakening. I sat in a room with maybe 20 or 25 of their engineers for the annual quality evaluation of suppliers. And I learned for the first time that we were in the bottom of the bottom quartile as a supplier. We had lousy quality, we had lousy invoicing, we had lousy on-time delivery. And this was my first general manager role! I had grown up as an engineer. And how did Tom respond to this unexpected shock? I had a holy shit moment! I had been in the job literally a week. So part of it was, 'Oh my God, what the hell am I going to do?' Also I thought about how my guys had been in the business for a while, and I thought, 'What the hell have you been doing?' And I was thinking, 'I'm going to clean house!' But then... I've learned that you just can't react viscerally every time something comes up because it just scares people away. So Tom listened attentively as the engineers from the auto company presented their litany of complaints. When they finally finished, he stood up and said, "I wouldn't blame you if you fired us as a supplier. But if you give us a chance to fix these problems, I guarantee you that that we will not have this kind of meeting next year." When Tom met with his team the next morning to discuss the situation, he started by just listening to them. They went on for some time complaining about how the company and their previous boss had made it impossible for them to provide good products and service. Rather than disagree with them or join in pointing fingers at others, Tom listened. "I didn't think about it at the time, but that first couple of hours was very cathartic for them. My focus was not on beating anyone up but rather, what can we do to fix this?" The team responded positively to Tom's approach. The next year when they met, the auto company told Tom that they "never saw any business turn around that quickly in one year." As a result, they began giving Tom's company more business, and Tom went on to a distinguished career, eventually becoming one of his company's top executives"--