partner… before the Seeds show?
… barely 5 feet tall with a burr haircut…
Walking into debate class in the 10th grade, I am certain Mr. Shumate looked up and thought, here we go. He had been coaching debate for 30 years by then, out of a small town in east Texas, and he had won the national debate tournament more than once. One of his former students had gone on to be elected Boys Nation President. He had every reason to file me under the kids who come and go… at about 5 feet tall with a burr haircut.
If you are the person who quietly assembles the teams in your organization, you know the version of this that happens in your week. Somebody walks into your office who does not look like much yet, and you have about 4 minutes to decide whether to spend real attention on them or be polite. You have made that call correctly and you have made it wrong, and the wrong ones still bother you. This week is for you.
…and he had already decided where to plant my Seeds…
What he did with me was not encouragement. He put me with a partner. Debate is a team sport, and you cannot win it alone no matter how badly you want to, so his actual craft was figuring out which 2 people complete each other. I never asked him why he made me 2nd Negative. I just fell into it, taking other people’s plans apart piece by piece, and it turned out to be the exact place my mind was built for… engineering in reverse. Every bad thing that will happen from this crazy idea…
Riley spent 60 years as the man everybody else pointed at. That is a strange position to hold, and most people who reach it never find out what it is worth, because the people who owe them the most say so at the funeral. Lucky for us, he got the other version…
… Eric Clapton had been naming him in interviews for 35 years. Not a nod, not a polite mention in a list … naming him as the source, over and over. From the moment anyone put a microphone in front of him in the 1960s. A whole generation of British players got rich selling American blues back to America, and Eric was one of the few who kept saying out loud, in public, where it came from and whose it was…
partners on the best selling album of his life, at 74
Eric partnered with B on Riding with the King in 2000. It won a Grammy. It went double platinum. At 74 years old, after 5 decades and hundreds of records, it was the best selling album of his entire life. The biggest commercial moment of a 6 decade career arrived through the partner who had spent 35 years telling everyone whose shoulders he was standing on.
And the best part: the title track is not by either of them. It was written by John Hiatt, a third man entirely, and it had been sitting there for years waiting for the 2 of them to need it.
Which partner goes first?
Most of the partnerships that never happen in your organization die exactly here. 2 people who would be good together are both waiting for a signal from the other one. Neither wants to spend the credit first. So it stays a nice idea, and 5 years later somebody mentions it at a leaving do.
The Seeds on this one were planted in public, out loud, by the person who had the least to gain. That is why they grew.
Mr. Shumate spent most of his life on the road, same as Riley. There was only 1 other high school in town and it did not have a team, so every weekend we were Riding with The King to: Austin, Dallas, Shreveport, Lufkin, Houston, Beaumont. We went to a tournament an hour south of Dallas that we had no real business attending, because it had a Student Congress event. I played along, got elected Speaker of the House on the strength of Robert’s Rules, which he had taught me, and a month later I won the state event as a consolation entry. He backed me to the National Debate Tournament in 1976. I did not win. I placed 4th, and it is still my proudest trophy, and it has almost nothing to do with me.
There is no “partner” Wednesday, there is a today…
In 2013, I found him and took him to a long lunch about a year before he died. I have almost no memory of what we ate and total recall of what I got to say. His eulogy is on YouTube, delivered by the students who won that national title, and they can barely get through it. Every one of them is standing there wishing for the lunch.
Picture the person you would call first if the thing you are building tomorrow actually worked. You have not spoken to them in 2 years. Not because anything went wrong … because there was never a Wednesday that seemed like the right day…
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: name the 1 person whose fingerprints are on how you lead, and tell them this week, out loud, with the specific thing named.
Helping leaders build their partners before they need them, rather than after, is a large part of the work I do now. Schedule time with me here.
Say it while they can hear it, and you might both find out what it sounds like to be Riding with the King.
