What partner keeps you Alive?
Both of our predecessors quit. Mine, in Product Management, and his, the VP of Engineering, left within a few months of each other, leaving a business that hadn’t shipped a new product… in 3 years. So the 2 of us met for the first time the way 2 people meet in a lifeboat: wary, wet, and doing the math on whether the other one could row.
Sound familiar? Different function, same quarter, same board deck. If the product doesn’t ship, neither of you gets the benefit of the doubt, and you both know it. You have been in 4 meetings together this month, and you have never once picked up the phone.
Turns out we both could row… and we both liked having a partner… because we were equally exposed. So we started talking every day. Not a meeting. A call, before anything else. What broke overnight, what he needed from my side, what I needed from his, and who on either team had a good idea…
What partner keeps the beat for your team?
Monday told the story of the tape Stone, and Jeff sent to a drummer in Los Angeles… that eventually got to Eddie in San Diego. That drummer was Jack Irons. They actually wanted him to be their drummer…Jack said no to the seat, yes to the friend, and helped form the band anyway…
When the band’s 3rd drummer was let go in 1994, they called Jack back. He said yes this time, and made his debut at Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefit that fall. He played on 2 records, No Code and Yield. Mike McCready wrote the music for “Given to Fly” during a snowstorm. It was snowing in Seattle, “which it rarely does,” the streets were shut, and he could not get his car out of the driveway, so he sat down with a guitar. Eddie wrote the words in a children’s book, a fable about rising above what people say about you without turning bitter or reclusive.
And Jack played it soft. His own words on the drum part: “I play a beat that’s based around the toms, but it’s pretty soft. I’m not sure I would have been comfortable playing that way a few years ago.” The song went to number 1 on the rock chart in early 1998, a few months before Jack left, because touring wasn’t working for him. A drummer who had learned, late, to hold back and let the song fly.
…and what were you both given to fly?
Within 6 months, our team shipped the first on-time product. Built, mostly, on the stop-gap ideas of the quiet people, because after our daily call one of us finally asked them. It was one of the hardest seasons of my career, and those calls are some of my best memories of it.
The leaders I work with now are the ones who can row the lifeboat alone… and often do. Senior, technical, the quiet best developer of people in the building, not yet known for it. Their instinct in the exposed season is to go quiet and work harder. Ours was too. The daily call is what kept us both Alive… and it is the partner practice for this week.
A caution from a leader who has been the drummer: it will feel like you are giving up time you do not have. You are giving up 10 minutes to get a partner who picks up. There is no better trade in the building. So … who is the 1 peer who would pick up on the first ring, and when did you last call?
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: name the 1 peer who is as exposed as you are this quarter. Send them 1 line today: same call, same time, every morning for 30 days? Then make the first 1.
Building that call is most of what I do with a leader in an exposed season. We can find yours… Schedule that here.
Jack said no to the band, yes to the friend, and formed a band. 4 years later he got to play a soft beat on 1 of their biggest songs. That is what a partner does. He hands you the tape … and then, when it counts, he finds what you have both been… Given to Fly.
