manage what Seeds cost?
My review came in the mail…
I was 19, and I opened my performance review at the kitchen table because it arrived in the mail, in an envelope, like a phone bill. I went in the next morning to talk about it, which I thought was the point of a review. My Boss looked up and said, “Oh yeah, I put that in the system a few weeks back. So long as you keep up your grades, that is 50% of it.” Done. That was the meeting.. and my review… for the next 4 years…
… I spent my days that year in a dark room, by myself, with a 30 watt laser that could melt silicon. I was 19. Nobody checked on me, and I do not think that was a decision anyone made. It was just that nothing in the system required it…nobody was “Paying the Cost to Be the Boss”
If you run anything, you have signed something like that this quarter. Not out of malice … out of volume. There was a form, the form had a deadline, and you cleared the deadline. Somebody on the other end of it read a sentence about themselves and decided what it meant, alone, with no help from you.
…and he had already forgotten he wrote it…
Riley ran one of the hardest working organizations in American music for 6 decades, and he was unusually specific about how. On hiring, in a 1982 interview, he put character in front of craft and did not hedge it: “When I choose guys for my band, I look at the man first and the musician second. If he’s 100% man and only 50% musician, that’s okay. We’ll turn him into 75% musician after a while.” On presentation: “I like for them to dress as if they are going to the bank, trying to get a loan.” He did not make that up … you will meet the man he got it from on Thursday…
… your manage rules… Seeds?
B was big on simplicity. His music, his style, his rules… read the structure carefully, because, like his playing, simple ain’t simple…
On discipline: “If they miss a gig, I may fine them and give it back later… I do have a rule: Three days of screwing up in a week’s time, and you’re out. No more fines.”
On leading: “If the band do it, I do it. I just got a notice from the office, and last year we did 320 days.”
On Teams, he refused pickup bands “I take the same band with me that I use everywhere else. It’s my group. I don’t pick up bands.”
On being the boss: “I’m just an employer, a bandleader. I’m not their father or guardian or anything of that sort.”
… and here is the Seeds part. Russell, who played bass for him, described their relationship as exactly a father and a son. His drummer Calep stayed roughly 32 years. The boss defined the role narrowly and the people inside it experienced something much larger. What he said he was doing was managing. What he was actually doing was planting.
… you planting Seeds… or weeds??
My first employer had a good idea called the JOB board, the Job Opportunity Bulletin. Post every opening internally, and rather than lose good people, let them move to a better fit. I moved to a new position every year of the 4 I was there, and had 4 very different managers, which taught me early and permanently that there is a free market for talent to use.
They paid my entire tuition and my salary for 4 years. I left when I graduated. So did most of the friends I had recruited into the program. Ten of us got an excellent education and walked out the door, and not one person ever asked us why. A great idea, managed poorly, sent its best talent in one door and out the other for a decade.
Write the 3 rules, it takes 20 minutes
The practice, and it takes about 20 minutes: write down the 3 rules your team could recite back to you tonight, without warning, in the parking lot. Not values. Rules. The thing that gets you a second chance and the thing that does not. Then ask 2 people to say them back, and see whether what you wrote is what they have been living under.
If you cannot get to 3, that is not a failure. That is the finding.
…so what would yours recite back?
Think of the person on your team who is 6 months from leaving and has not told anybody yet. They are doing the arithmetic I did at 19, in a dark room, on their own. Is this manager helping me grow, giving me an opportunity, and a problem worth my time? They will finish that calculation… with you Paying the Cost… in one way or the other…
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: write your 3 rules on 1 page this week, then read them out loud in your next team meeting and let people argue with them.
I have run the version of this that gets it wrong, and I have helped a lot of leaders build the version that holds. That is most of the work I do now. Schedule time with me here.
He wrote the rules down and he took the smallest paycheck in the room, which is what it looks like when somebody is actually Paying the Cost to Be the Boss.
