Chapter 2
Jumping First
Each person must live their life as a role model for others.
Rosa Parks
High divers are a crazy bunch, quite comfortable doing uncomfortable and unnatural things—after all, if we were meant to fly, God would have given us wings. But despite our willingness to take unnatural leaps, one particular high-dive opportunity held little appeal for any of us. The team had been asked to perform during the annual Osmond Family Fourth of July extravaganza at Brigham Young Stadium in Provo, Utah. We were part of a lineup that included Donny and Marie, the rest of the Osmond family, singer Crystal Gayle, and actor Mr. T. More than fifty thousand spectators were expected to attend the show.
In addition to our performing a sensational repertoire of Olympic-style dives, the entire extravaganza was to culminate in a huge fireworks display as a high diver plunged from the top of the ladder while holding two lit flares, one in each hand. The dive was to be performed to “The Flight of the Bumble Bee,” the frenetic musical piece from the opera Tsar Sultan. But there was a little problem. Unbeknownst to the Osmond family, none of us bigshot divers wanted to do the spectacular crescendo dive. First of all, the dive would be done in the glare of a blinding spotlight after all the other stadium lights were shut off. Second, diving with two lit flares would severely limit the diver’s arm movement, something that is critical for performing aerial acrobatics. Finally, having to dive among all the exploding pyrotechnics presented dangers beyond reason. The thought of getting blown up by an errant skybomb was less than inviting.
After growing annoyed with everyone’s bellyaching, our most seasoned veteran, Hamilton Riddle, volunteered to do it. To appreciate the magnitude of this gesture, you have to know Hamilton. At six-foot-five and 240 pounds, Hamilton is a Goliath of a man. Because the diving tank was only ten feet deep, Hamilton wouldn’t have much stopping room. And though he was incredibly fit, “H” (as we called him), at forty-five years old, was the oldest eagle in our flock.
Through the rose-colored glasses of hindsight, it is tempting to view Hamilton’s volunteering to do the dive as having something to do with his having larger cojones than the rest of us. The more accurate truth is that he had more to lose in not doing the dive. Hamilton was a part owner of the production company that was responsible for staging the high-diving show, and a lot of his own money was at stake. The Osmonds had forked over a healthy sum for the show, and now it was up to us to deliver. What choice did Hamilton really have but to step up? Courage, in this case, had more to do with desperation than with bravery. The risk of losing all that Osmond money was bigger than the risk of doing the stunt dive.
The dramatic moment when the spotlight illuminated Hamilton atop the ladder will always stay with me. There he was, this colossus of a man, arms outstretched to the sides like some mythic aerial savior, fireworks exploding all around him, perched at the top of the world. For a brief moment, Hamilton wasn’t Hamilton. He had morphed into high diving’s senior-most archangel. His spectacular flare dive was glorious and humbling to behold. The crowd erupted with a huge applause as he surfaced the water, fists raised in triumph. At once he represented all that each diver could have been and all that we had declined to be. Desperate or not, Hamilton had stepped up when we had backed down. He had led, courageously, by Jumping First.
Management by Jumping First
In the grand scheme of things, there are two ways to get workers to do things: push from behind or attract from the front. Managers who choose the former stand far from the battle lines, issuing directives for workers to execute. Managers who choose the latter stand on the front lines, indeed in front of the front lines, leading through the power of attraction. This is what I call Management by Jumping First (MBJF), and it is the most powerful and effective way of getting comfeartable workers to do uncomfortable things.
Courage is relative. Just as a lens can be used to magnify or shrink an object depending on the way it is held, your perception of a situation can change dramatically based on how close to the situation you are. There is a vast difference, for example, between the perspectives of a high diver and the spectators in the audience. From the audience’s vantage point peering up, the big ladder stretches up a hundred feet. But from the diver’s perspective looking at the pool, it plunges a thousand feet down. The audience sits comfortably in their seats, imagining what the diver must be going through. The diver, however, isn’t imagining anything. Instead, he is perched atop a rickety steel ladder, shivering from the cold wind, struggling to contain intense feelings of fear while simultaneously concentrating on the dive. In a moment, after all, he will be careening toward the pool at over fifty miles per hour protected only by a bathing suit.
The most practical reason for Jumping First is that it gives you a firsthand understanding about the risks you’re asking your workers to take and, therefore, the amount of courage they’ll need to meet the challenges. By experiencing the jump before they do, you’ll be able to anticipate the aspects of the challenge that workers are likely to balk at. Just as important, by being the first up and off the high-dive ladder, you’ll gain a lot of credibility with them. In the same way that workers have no respect for distant managers who abide by a doas-I-say-not-as-I-do philosophy, they hold the highest respect for managers who do the uncomfortable things they are asking others to do, first.
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Workers have the highest regard for managers who do the same uncomfortable things they are asking the workers to do, but who do them first.
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The word lead implies to stay out in front. As a practical reality, you cannot follow someone who is not in front of you. Jumping First involves a mixture of leadership, role modeling, and initiative, and the best way to get people to follow you is to first take the high dives you’re asking others to take. Hamilton Riddle’s skyrocketing dive, for example, motivated all of us divers to work harder. After the Osmond show, we had to stay up all night tearing down the equipment so that we could set it all up again in time to perform a set of shows in Saskatoon, Canada, forty-eight hours later. Hamilton’s lead in stepping up and doing the big scary dive made it easier for us to deal with the fatigue of an all-night tear-down. We owed it to him to do a good job. Without Hamilton’s role modeling, I’m not sure we would have worked through the night without complaining.
MBJF at Work
I once saw MBJF in action during my involvement as a facilitator of a cultural-transformation effort at a large Southern utilities organization. The company’s future hinged on its ability to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit of its three-thousand-person workforce, and the entire organization was being required to attend an intensive three-day off-site culture-change program to support the endeavor. The senior managers knew that if they could get the employees to make more tactical on-the-spot decisions themselves, it would free up the managers’ time so that they could focus their attention on more strategic matters. But as employees of a utility company, workers weren’t used to being “entrepreneurial.” So, from a cultural standpoint the behavioral transformation that the company desired of the workforce was substantial.
Leading up to the three-day off-site was a 360-degree feedback survey that gauged people’s commitment to the company’s newly created core values, one of which was “We make bold decisions.” In true MBJF fashion, the senior managers insisted on being the first ones to subject themselves to the scrutiny of the survey. These managers weren’t spectators watching their workers take high dives; instead they became high divers themselves. They didn’t have to imagine why anyone might find the process uncomfortable; instead they were personally discomforted by it. Having your leadership evaluated by your boss, peers, and coworkers is enough to heighten the self-consciousness of even the most thick-skinned executive.
Because the anonymity and confidentiality of the survey respondents are assured, people are often far more candid than they would be giving feedback directly to the leader’s face. By being the first to open themselves up to the scrutiny of others, the senior managers helped to motivate the rest of the workforce to get behind the changes. Their actions sent a strong message about courage and integrity—namely, that no one in the company should be exempt from the evaluation of others, most especially the company leaders. Moreover, by employing MBJF, the senior managers role-modeled their own deep commitment to the culture-change effort that they were expecting everyone else to support.
Clarifying the Views
There has been a lot written about the importance of vision to being a good leader. It’s important to managers too. Managers, like leaders, need to provide workers with an inspiring vision of how better things will be (for the workers themselves and for the company) as a result of their work. But it’s also important that you provide concrete “views”—smaller and more personalized visions that enable workers, at an individual level, to have a clear line of sight between their efforts and their advancement. To do that, you’ll need to stand on the same high-dive ladders that you’re asking workers to stand on. This doesn’t mean you have to have the very same skills as they do. Rather, it means having firsthand experience with challenges that are similar to those you’re asking them to face. So, if you’re expecting a worker to go through the nerve-racking experience of making a presentation to the senior executive team, you should have had that experience somewhere along the line, too. Likewise, if you’re asking a worker to take a hard-line position with a vendor, or deal with an angry customer, or lead a death-march project, you should have faced similar challenges as part of your career at some point, too.
Too often, managers are seen as mouthpieces of the higher-ups. This is validated for workers when you mimic the same phrases that every other executive uses. When lower-level employees hear you talk about the “strategic value-added proposition for the end-users,” for example, they start to think that you’ve drunk too much of the organizational happy-juice. When workers come to think of you as little more than an executive parrot, any vision you offer them becomes suspect. By Jumping First, you inspire workers to value you as an independent thinker. They see that the vision you hold is grounded in real work experiences and an authentic desire to see them succeed. Jumping First helps you to create individual views that each respective worker can use to succeed—views that are more specific, concrete, and easier to follow than a large abstract vision. Providing workers with narrower and clearly defined views, based on your own firsthand experiences of what they are contending with, is far more useful to them in their daily work lives than trumpeting an ethereal company vision that will take years to materialize.
Jumping with Attitude
By Jumping First, you set an attitudinal and behavioral tone that others learn to emulate. It helps to lead not from where people are, but from where you need them to be. To this end, it is useful to identify the attitudes and behaviors you find frustrating, and then be sure to role-model opposite ones. If, for example, your direct reports are apathetic, you should counterbalance their apathy by being energetic. The idea here is that as a manager you shouldn’t expect workers to be held to a standard by which you don’t abide. Thus if you want workers to show more initiative, you first must show initiative. If you want them to go out of their way to understand how their work connects to a broader vision, or to have more accountability for their work, or to be more positive, you must do these things first.
Going to work with your own courage will go a long way toward getting others to go to work with theirs.
Jumping First … First
In the last chapter, you were introduced to the Courage Foundation Model, which depicts four things you’ll need to do in order to get people to be more courageous. Most often, Jumping First, doing what you’re asking others to do, is the most powerful part of the model. It requires you to focus on you before focusing on them. Before figuring out how to get people to have the courage to demonstrate more initiative, trust, and assertiveness, first figure out how you’re going to do those things. Nothing is as powerful as role-modeling the courageous behavior you expect from others.
Here are some questions that will help you to Manage by Jumping First:
Questions for Reflection
As a manager, what are some ways that you have been too comfeartable? What might your own actions, attitudes, or behaviors be transmitting to your workers?
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What kind of role model are you for courageous behavior? What could you do to be a better courage role model?
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Think about each worker you’re responsible for. What challenging experiences have you faced in your career that might be useful to them? How might these experiences help you to develop “views” for each of them?
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What behaviors or attitudes do you find frustrating about your direct reports? What compensatory behaviors or attitudes should you start role-modeling in order to help shift their behavior?
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