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There are, when one is in charge, these moments that I call Leadership Opportunities. They are moments when a person has a chance to change a situation for good or ill, without needing huge programs or policies. They can be simple things, like remembering that someone just had a death in the family, and instead of sending an email, or having your assistant send flowers with your name on them, dropping by their desk, taking them to lunch, and letting them know that as much as possible, the company will do what they can to make a bad situation a little easier. They can be complex things, like having a suggestion program mean something.

But they happen a dozen times a day, and if you ignore them for too long, you'll have a company full of people that only work there for the money, and the benefits, and will leave you the first chance they get.

I see the consequences of flubbing Leadership Opportunities every day. I also see the rewards that happen when you handle them correctly. When continuously flubbed, moral dives, and people do their jobs just well enough to not get fired. When handled correctly, you get a cadre of people who will kill themselves for you, because they know you respect them.

That is, by the way, what Leadership Opportunities get you. Loyalty borne of mutual respect. By properly handling an Leadership Opportunity, you show that you respect your employees as people with skills and abilities that you don't have. You show them that you understand that they are just as critical to the success of the company as you are, perhaps more so. The person at the top sets the tone and demeanor for the company. But they don't do the work. If you're in charge of a company, don't fool yourself. You may work long hours, but you need those people who call you boss far more than they need you. Without you, they're just unemployed. If they're good, they won't stay that way for long. Without them, you don't have a company, and if you've failed miserably enough at handling Leadership Opportunities, everyone who might employ you as an executive will know that you can't handle leadership, and you'll find that for some reason, you just can't seem to find a new gig as nice as your last one. Trust me here, people talk. Nothing you do is a secret.

The problem is, how do you know you're in the middle of an Leadership Opportunity? Well, it's not like you get a sign from the heavens. But if you assume that every contact you make with a subordinate is an Leadership Opportunity, you're on the right path. Let me give you some examples of Leadership Opportunities handled both right and wrong.

I've a friend who's a tech type for an audio company. One of the things they do is set up sound systems for events. Monitors, amps, speakers, the whole bit. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of stuff that all has to be shipped back and forth. The procedure for packing this stuff is meticulous, and there's no room for free-wheeling it, with good reason. Pack a box wrong, you just burned thousands of dollars. He told me of a new guy who thought he had a better way. Turned out he was wrong. About fifty thousand dollars wrong. As expected, he got called into the boss's office. The conversation went something like this:

You know why you're here, right?

Uh-huh.

You know what you did wrong?

Uh-huh.

Do you know exactly where and why you went wrong?

Uh-huh.

So you learned why we do things the way we do them?

Uh-huh.

Good, now get out of my office and get back to work.

Um....aren't I fired?

Fired? Hell no, I just spent fifty grand to train you, now get the hell back to what I pay you for!

Had the boss fired the guy, no one would have blamed him. But by properly handling that Leadership Opportunity, he not only showed everyone there that he respected them even when they screwed up, but he now had an employee that would just about die for him. All he did was not fire him, and make sure that he had learned from his mistake, and he had someone who wouldn't leave him for a mere raise.

You literally cannot buy that. You only get it from handling Leadership Opportunities right.

Another example:

Friend of mine wakes up and sees that it's snowing like heck outside. Can't even see the ground from the third floor, where he lives. He said that he realized that driving was dangerous, and even being on the road was a bad idea. Since he's a sysadmin, and didn't have anything critical scheduled that required him to be in that day, he emailed his boss, and let him know that he was going to work from home over the VPN. The next day, he gets yelled at. Evidently, unbeknownst to him, the corporate tradition was that not only did you show up during a blizzard, but that the CEO would personally check every desk, and anyone not there had to use a vacation day.

Was this a justifiable position to take? Of course. You get paid to be at work, not home. However, thanks to this flubbed Leadership Opportunity, he now knows that his company only cares about him as a body filling a slot. His presence as a keister in a chair was more important than his health, well-being, and safety. As he said, “I don't think they're going to like my reaction the next United Way drive, or any other time they want a little more out of me, 'cause I'm done doing anything beyond enough to not get fired.” This is a guy who normally will spend a lot of his off-time thinking about ways to make things work better at work. Now, he shows up, does what he's required to, and leaves. If he's there late, it's because he has to be.

A flubbed Leadership Opportunity, and a potential star performer is now a warm body in a seat, gradually increasing his perusal of dice.com and monster.com. Even worse, there's no chance that anyone he knows will ever work for his company, in fact, he's probably warning them if they mention it. A flubbed Leadership Opportunity hurts you in so many ways.

Another company, another story. A guy has a new employee review to do. He's been keeping notes of the reviewee's successes and failures. He's noted that while she's not been perfect, any failures have been one time problems and for different reasons. Each time she's failed, she's had a good attitude towards it, and worked a little harder to make sure that she understood why she failed, and more importantly, doesn't repeat the mistake. Finally, the total number of failures even worth noting, are two. With two unrelated exceptions, she's been the kind of person that you want your company to be packed with. Good attitude, good work ethic, excellent quality, and every comment you've ever gotten has been positive. That review writes itself, and it did.

About a week after the review is turned in, he's told that he has to change it by a VP. He has to severely downgrade her rating because of one of the notable failures. Of course, like most failures, it didn't happen in a vacuum, and several people, including this VP contributed mightily towards it. He tells the VP he won't downgrade her. She earned that review. He's not going to downgrade it for a one time occurrence. To do that would send the message that dozens of successes, some quite critical were meaningless because she was imperfect one time. He doesn't want her to go, and that message would be a great way to do it.

So he stands his ground. Says he's not changing the review. The VP threatens to rewrite it to suit his needs. My friend tells him that if that review is rewritten, he won't sign it, nor will he have anything to do with it. Much discussion happens with the friend's boss, and he stands his ground. Luckily, the boss supports him with the VP. The VP tells him, “Well, she's only going to get the same raise as she would for a mediocre review, so it's not like you're doing her a favor there.” My friend replies, “That's not a problem, she knows times are tight. But with someone like her, telling her 'Thanks' for doing a good job goes a lot farther than you think, and even with a mediocre raise, she'll continue to bust her hump if she knows that her work is appreciated. That's what that review is for.” She gets the great review and the mediocre raise. Comes to my friend a month later and says that she just found out what he went through for her, and wanted to thank him. He told her, “I didn't give you that review, you gave yourself that review. If you want the next one to be that good, it's going to be a lot harder, because that review now spells out what I'll consider to be 'average' performance for this coming year.” He said she looked at him for a long time, realized he was serious, and took him up on that challenge. He says her next review was only hard to write because he kept running out of synonyms for “outstanding”.

There we have two simultaneous Leadership Opportunities one handled well, one handled poorly. My friend handled his well, and got an employee who knew that she could trust him to have her back, and stick his neck out for her, so that she could do her job well, which made her more than willing to prove to him that he could expect to keep writing those excellent reviews. My friend learned that the VP of his department was an amoral jerk who would trash someone so that he could feel good about giving them a bad raise. Neither my friend nor his reviewee work for that company anymore, and both were glad to leave.

Final story:

Another friend of mine works for a company where the leadership is only encountered at company meetings, or random hallway encounters. Any other encounter only happens when the stuff has hit the fan, and bad things are about to happen. Rumors are rampant, secrecy is the word of the day, and working with people outside of his department happens in spite of the company's best efforts. Even working with people in his own department is nigh-impossible. He still doesn't know what most of the folks in his department even do or look like. His environment is a string of almost constantly flubbed Leadership Opportunities, because the folks at the top are using the best leadership traditions of Louis the XVI and Marie Antoinette. Since they don't encourage communication, no one does, and the string of flubbed Leadership Opportunities piles up like garbage during a strike.

Leadership Opportunities are hard, they don't warn you, and you only get one chance to handle one right. However, learning to recognize them, and handling them correctly are critical to the success of your company.

I challenge anyone in a position of power reading this to review their last three incidents that could have been an Leadership Opportunity and look at it from the other person's point of view. Did they walk away feeling good, bad, or apathetic? Did you show them the respect you want from them, or did you show them that you only care about their output? Did you ace it, or flub it. Eventually, you'll know. You always do.

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