Month: February 2018

Have you ever noticed how many marathon running analogies, metaphors and similes are used in the personal finance, financial independence and FIRE communities? And please don’t ask me to differentiate between analogies, metaphors and similes because its complicated and I’m an engineer and not an English major. Perhaps it is the unique place marathons hold in the running universe, the most common long distance race. Or maybe it is the fact that while running is a fast sport, marathons still take a long time to complete. But almost certainly they are a popular model of life because they require endurance and a sustainable pace as opposed to the instantaneous all out effort of a 100 meter sprint.

My financial journey to FI and slightly early retirement certainly occurred at a pace very much like my marathon gait. Slow and steady. While world class marathoners run 26.2 miles in just over two hours my goal in marathons was to finish in under four hours. That sounds ridiculously slow I know to non-runners and to elite runners alike but since I ran most of my marathons in my fifties I still finished in the top fourth of my age group most of the time so it is all relative. But fittingly it does parallel my FI finish time pretty closely. I achieved a seven figure net worth at fifty, the same year I ran my lifetime fastest marathon and 5K. Compared to Mr. Money Mustache, the Frugalwoods and FireCracker who hit FI in their early 30’s me getting there at fifty is almost an exact match to how I compared to elite marathoners. They are world class, me, well I’m in the top 25% of my age group.

That inability to finish with the best could be cause for envy or shame but it never hit me that way. I realized I do not have the genetic makeup to be a great long distance runner, because I trained as long and as hard as many elite runners just to achieve mediocrity. But I’m still proud of the effort, which at times took every ounce of will power in my aching body. I ran through illness and injury and never, ever, withdrew from a single one of the 15 marathons I entered. Sometimes it wasn’t pretty when I was so cramped up I literally had to drag an unresponsive leg behind me across the finish line, but I just could not quit something I had started. Certainly that is a trait that is necessary in the run to FI as well.

When I look at the advantages I had of being a high earner with a frugal spouse living in an area of the country were housing was inexpensive and commuting was unheard of I had no excuse for not succeeding. Excuses, that brings to mind the most vivid example I’ve personally seen of refusing to have one. It was the marine corps marathon in Washington DC. I wasn’t well trained and I was feeling the beginnings of the creeping desperation that sets in during the opening miles of a race when I saw a cluster of guys running up ahead of me. They were soldiers, marines, in uniform with heavy battle packs on their backs and the four of them were at each corner of a fifth marine in the middle of the formation. Two of them had odd objects on their backs that I couldn’t make out until I got closer. Then in shock and awe I realized they were prosthetic legs belonging to the uniformed man in the middle who was in a racing wheelchair. He had lost his legs in the explosion of an improvised explosive device in Iraq. I was overwhelmed with emotion for this marine who was committed to powering through 26 miles with just his hands to move him and for his brothers running with him in fatigues and heavy packs on that hot day. I think I cried for at least a mile, it affects me even now when I think about it. I never felt sorry for myself or thought about quitting again that day. How could I? Examples of living life courageously with purpose inspire us all to be better than we are, and in this community, we have an abundance of great examples. Running marathons alone is tough, running with friends, with brothers and sisters, is so much easier. The FI race is no different and the bloggers and podcasters and authors that have committed themselves to helping the rest of us, lift us up with their examples of endurance and success.

Sitting here composing this I just had an epiphany! One of the reasons I did not achieve FI sooner was that I did not start as early as I could have. I was buying new cars and making some of the common money mistakes in my twenties and there were no 401k plans available yet at my company so I wasn’t investing aggressively. While I ultimately was still fine that delay put FI off by about ten years. In my case I actually loved my job and would not have retired any earlier but getting that late start did cost me at least a million dollars. And what I realized just now was that while I never would have been an elite runner I almost certainly would have been much faster had I started earlier with my running. I didn’t run in high school or college and only began short runs in my mid-thirties. I started real endurance distance running in my mid-forties which meant by the time I was at my technical best my body was already well past its peak performance years. Physical strength and speed are a lot like compound interest in that if you want to achieve your max performance you have to start early.

Pacing matters. I ran twelve marathons as fast as I could and they were extremely painful. There was very little pleasure involved except for crossing the finish line. And that was OK because my goal was all about my finish time. I ran three marathons with another person, two with my wife, where I was the faster runner and was able to run coach them through the race. Just slowing down my overall race time by twenty minutes or so made the whole race a lot of fun. There is a lesson there for the FI journey as well. It may be that living like a hermit in a refrigerator box on saltines and ketchup packets from McDonalds would get you to FI at the age of 29, or 39 or 49 but that is going to be a life of mostly pain. Perhaps the optimum course is for you and your running mate to slow the pace only slightly, to where you can actually talk as you run and enjoy the beautiful landscape you are traversing and still get to the finish line at 32, or 42 or 52. Is winning the race three years faster worth suffering through the run or can you have your cake and eat it? Can you run hard but not so hard that life hurts? I think you can and I think you should.

I still run 18 miles a week but a decided lack of cartilage in one knee has made marathons a bad idea for me so like I did with my 9 to 5 job I have retired from long races. Do I miss them? No! But did they teach me a lot about living life? They did. They taught me that pain is OK for three hours and forty-eight minutes if you are shooting for your personal best finish at 50 years of age. They also taught me that running painfully flat out on the edge of collapse might work for a race but it is no way to live your life. Have you learned something about the FI journey from one of your sports or hobbies you would like to comment on?

Many of the bloggers and podcasters in the FI and FIRE community have shared that they got into financial trouble early in their own adult lives in part because their parents were not good at handling money. As the proverb goes, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”. Maybe it takes coming back from a money disaster to build the kind of passion that inspires a great blog, too. If so I’m in trouble because my financial journey was plain vanilla with hardly a misstep along the way. This post is about why my path to financial independence was so smooth, with the credit going to my parents.

Mom and Dad taught me to work. This was more than a few years ago and in those ancient times there were no child labor laws being enforced. My first job was working as an indentured servant to my crafty brother as a newspaper delivery boy. Yes, believe it or not, snowflakes, parents let kids get up at 5:30 AM and ride their bicycles in the dark throwing newspapers in complete stranger’s yards before school. And in my case it was elementary school. Don’t try this at home now, child protective services will come confiscate your kids and probably your dogs as well. Allowances did not exist, hand outs from parents did not exist, only jobs existed. I learned that earning money was hard work when it was 5 deg F outside or when it was pouring rain or when huge playful dogs decided to drag me and my bicycle around their yards like a giant squeaky toy! As a side benefit I learned to manage and budget my spending to fit the miniscule amount my parsimonious brother paid me.

As I grew older I kept throwing newspapers for my miserly brother but eventually moved up to much better paid minimum wage jobs assembling bicycles and lawnmowers at a retail store, sacking groceries, general help at a pharmacy and then hit the big time with factory assembly line jobs. I learned about overtime and got a first hand look at adults who were supporting families on paychecks that barely covered my college pizza bill. I came to realize my parents did not just make me work to earn spending money but because it offered a first-hand comparison of manual labor (me) and the management and engineers who supported the operations. It was pretty easy to see that the variety of work and presumably the pay for the engineers was considerably better than what was going to those of us on the assembly line. It taught me that there was no way I would survive doing the same repetitive tasks over and over 40 hours a week. It was all I could do to make it through the summer. That incentive to stay in school and avoid manual labor probably had as much to do with me becoming an engineer as anything else.

Dad and Mom met in college. He was there after the war on the GI bill. Both of them had better incomes than their parents due to the education they received and they were big believers in its value. There was never a question of whether my brother and I would attend college, it was a given. We were both extremely intelligent nerd kids so it was in the cards for us anyway but the fact that our parents paid our way without the need for any school loans, because they had saved up the cash to do so, was another great example. My wife and I did not have to borrow any money and our three millennial kids received their four year degrees without a single dollar of debt. Well, actually, our three kids all got completely free rides since they were brainiacs but we had the money set aside had we needed it. We ended up just giving it to them when they graduated. All three paid their own way for their advanced degrees.

My mom first planted the seed of chemical engineering in my mind. She was a school teacher and she knew that the son of my favorite math teacher was a chemical engineer. She casually mentioned that it was apparently a very well-paid profession and since I was a chemistry and math nerd I thought it sounded perfect for me. My dad did not specifically weigh in on a major but he was very supportive of anything that sounded complicated based on the idea that it probably paid better the harder it was to achieve. He had also managed to advance from basic seaman duty on an aircraft carrier during WWII to operating the ship’s radar and I think that gave him a healthy appreciation for how technical skills could improve your work experience. Engineering became my chosen major and it turned into a great career. My parents, as usual had been right again! Two of my three kids also became engineers, the third refused to be brainwashed and earned a business degree although she was summa cum laude in doing it.

There were many money lessons my folks taught in the home by example. For instance, they paid cash for everything. Appliances, furniture and even their cars were bought with cash. My dad sold insurance and my mom taught in the public schools so we were by no means wealthy yet they used the envelope system to save money for large purchases. I thought that was normal, I had no idea that most people took out car loans! It was kind of a shock to find that out later. They also used credit cards but made a point to explain that they paid off the balance every month.

Dad became a little bit more successful over time but he did not succumb to lifestyle inflation. The modest house my brother and I were raised in was never traded in for a larger home. With the help of a carpenter he did eventually add one room on to the house so my brother and I could be separated. Apparently, the deprivation of working for him for slave wages had instilled in my mind the desire to kill him in his sleep, but I’m mostly over that…mostly. Similarly my wife and I have lived in our first and only house for over thirty years, and have no plans to move. We also added on but the house remains very modest for our net worth. My wife’s parents also lived their entire married lives in the same small house so it was a family tradition on both sides.

My parents, greatest generation members, did not job hop around much. I do know my dad had three jobs over a 45 year career but he stayed at his last job for over thirty of those years and my mom never changed jobs. That was far less common in my generation but not unheard of. Like my parents I stayed at one company my entire career and my wife primarily worked the same job until she early retired. This is not advice I would give to a millennial now, times have changed and the chance of working in one or two jobs is very small and probably a bad idea. My dad also chose to keep working part time until his seventies. I early retired three years ago but immediately started part time side gigs because that seemed to make sense to keep me relevant and challenged. My plan is to keep my part time work for the foreseeable future like my dad did.

Dad kept a detailed spreadsheet of his investments and net worth. He was pretty proud of the fact that he was that guy, the Millionaire Next Door. We keep ours on Personal Capital which is a heck of a lot less work! While he never made six figures, usually less than half of that, Dad amassed an estate of nearly two million dollars by saving aggressively and by having every penny invested in a well diversified portfolio. He had invested so well that even though he and my mom spent their last years in assisted living and nursing homes at the cost of almost nine thousand dollars a month, his net worth continued to grow. By the time my parents passed away my brother and I were already millionaires on our own due to our having saved and invested well over our careers. Of course, my brother had the advantage of skimming most of the wages he should have paid me as a child laborer but really, I’m fine about that now.

While this is specific to people of Jewish or Christian faith my dad also taught me to tithe. He gave 10% of his gross income to the local church and my wife and I have done that as well. We also give generously to charities and to individuals in need. Regardless of religious beliefs I believe giving to help those in need is a key part of prospering financially. Dad was convinced that by giving to others the money would be returned to in even greater amounts. While I do not believe that is literally the case in monetary terms I do believe that learning to give makes you generous and that generous people do far better in their careers than stingy people. Strangely my brother is very generous now, probably as penance for my mistreatment.

My parents modeled joint decision making and kindness to each other. I am sure this contributed to their 63 year marriage. I never heard either of them speak harshly or disrespectfully to the other. Divorce is extremely expensive and although staying married is not primarily a financial decision I believe statistics support that a happy marriage correlates with financial health. Both my brother and I have been married for over thirty years to much better halves than we deserve which has definitely helped our financial success. I believe having someone who loves you and who has got your back helps work stress seem much less stressful and leads to greater productivity and less burn out.

Looking back now that both my parents are gone it is easy to recognize the many ways they helped shape the better parts of my nature. Most of it was not by lecture but by example. We all recoil a little as we grow older and we find ourselves, oh no, turning into our parents! But while I am not crazy about inheriting my dad’s hair loss I’m pretty good with the fact I inherited some solid financial life skills. Thanks, Mom and Dad!

This is the second and final installment of everything I found that worked about managing teams from three decades in the Fortune 500 world. If you are reading this then you probably read the first part, but if not then please check out Part 1 to get the complete picture.

As detailed in my previous post the reason I decided to post this was because a former employee had recently looked me up just to tell me she had modeled her career after mine. She told me I was the best boss she had ever had and she wanted her team to love their work the way my team had back in the day when she was an intern. That was pretty awesome to hear! It also fits into this community to suggest ways to get ahead at work because promotions and salary increases will speed your way to FI or FIRE.

In the first post I covered how critical it is to not only treat every team member as your equal but to really believe it, or get another job! I covered how your function is no longer to produce a ton of work but to equip, inspire and lead your team to produce multiple amounts of work. Also how important it is to hire talent because having a world class team is what will lead to personal success. Finally, I covered fighting for your team when it comes to raises, training and even when facing layoffs.

But there is a lot more to cover so here it is!

Teach your team that customers come first. Our team was composed of graduate engineers and engineering student interns. We did not deal with the end users of our products very much, the people that you would normally consider to be your customers. We did both the design on plant expansions and also solved technical problems that impacted the operations of the chemical plant. Also, since we were the “whiz kids” that could solve any problem that came up we acted as a sort of technical support department for the 500 or so other employees at our site and every difficult problem eventually got dropped on our desks with a plea for help. These were problems of our internal customers and not our own team’s problems and we were not given much guidance from above on how much time to spend on them.

I say all that to explain how we prioritized. We had assignments from my boss and his boss and then we had requests from all the other departments. So how did we decide what to do first? Obviously you do what your boss requests first, right? Wrong! I strongly encouraged my team to put the requests from those without the authority to demand action ahead of the demands from the top.

I decided to place the requests from other departments (our internal customers) as the top priority for myself and my team. It may sound crazy to prioritize a request from a junior accountant in another department over a directive from the plant manager or the vice president he worked for but that is exactly what we did. We also got the boss’s work done, early if possible, but we jumped on the lower level requests first. Most of those requests were short term in nature and it proved surprisingly easy to get them out of the way without derailing the important big projects we were assigned.

What did that accomplish? We made friends because we bailed people out of trouble on a timely basis when they knew we didn’t have to. There is nothing as important as trust and gratitude in a business environment and we built both by showing we valued coworkers by prioritizing their requests. Was there a downside? Yes, because to avoid being late on deadlines from upper management we sometimes had to stay late to solve all the lower tiered internal customer issues. Was it worth it? I think so. Of the eight engineers in my former team, and the interns, most of them are now vice presidents, or manage large departments and are making medium to high six figure salaries. Some have retired early like me. I rose to the top job in the company by the time I was 41 by being promoted past the other department managers even though they were all ten to twenty years older than me. And they were, by and large, happy for me because of the trust and affection my team had earned. This concept is not taught in college and is not obvious to most people so it is an easy way to separate yourself from other team leaders if your team has internal customers. Most people think that you get promoted because of talent. That’s only partially true. The most important factors in getting bigger paychecks and promotions are how much the decision makers above you trust you and how much they like you. The fact is they are constantly evaluating your brand among your coworkers in determining how promotable you are. If they see you are well liked and trusted by other teams then you are on your way.

Lead by example. Part of the work in our team was dividing the large chemical complex into separate areas and having each team member responsible for about one hundred million dollars of process equipment and the products it produced. In the past the team leader, always a former team member, would not assign himself part of the plant, he’d just assign his old area to someone else on the team when he promoted to team manager. I didn’t do that. I kept my old area assignment because I did not want to lose touch with that important part of what my team members did. There was a fair amount of tedious record keeping and data analysis that went with optimizing the operations of your part of the facility and when there were operating problems you were sometimes called out on nights, weekends or holidays to get the “ox out of the ditch.” That isn’t so much fun but it is way more tolerable when you see your boss doing it too. I not only came out when my part of the plant messed up but I also came out when theirs did. Sure, I had to work some extra hours, but not that many and we really bonded when they saw I had their backs, no matter what. It also kept me from saving the “cake” work for myself and delegating the “crap” work to my team. Most team leaders do way too much of that. The results were it gave me a loyal team that respected and protected me.

Teach your team all your tricks and tips. I was one of those lucky people who fit my job like a hand in a glove. I never had to work very hard, it just all sort of flowed on its own. A lot of the “secrets” of being successful were obvious to me but not always to every team member I had. I made it a mission to share everything I could to help my people succeed. Things like the knowledge that most of the credit you got on a project was not determined by the quality of your work. Sounds a little insane, right? What I mean is that the quality of the project is judged not on the meat of the work but on the elegance of the presentation. One misspelled word in a report, one bad use of grammar in the presentation to management can destroy a hundred hours of flawless calculations. It is not fair but it is how the world works so I taught my folks to spend a lot of extra time triple checking the deliverables on their work. I’m a typo fiend, I can rarely read a novel by a leading author without finding at least one typo. They just jump off the page at me. (That said I’ll probably make one in this post!) We preached incessantly that perfection was the only acceptable level for the final presentation and I firmly believe that led to the stellar careers that my former team members are enjoying today.
We also encouraged everyone to have a buddy on the team that would proofread their reports and backcheck their calculations. That is just one example but there were dozens of technical tips that we shared freely. All of that was based on the fact that my team was not my competition, they were my launching pad to future success.

Help them go somewhere else if that is the best thing for them. I hired the best and our company did not have enough promotion opportunities to match the number of top level people I was training. That meant that some of them would get stuck at levels that would not let them reach their full potential. In those cases I encouraged some incredibly talented people to leave our company. Consequently I have friends all over the country in important positions, just like my intern that inspired this post. You are not doing your company a service by keeping talented people stuck below their true potential.
In other cases you may have a talented team member that wants to change direction within your company, maybe transfer to a sister facility or a completely different functional area, like marketing. You could view this as a personal loss and try to stop it or slow the process down but that is a mistake. You have to consider the opportunity from their position and do your best to make it happen if it truly will benefit them. I transferred out so much talent to other locations and departments that I felt like a training department. But that has given me a great network that makes some of my entertaining retirement side gigs possible today.
And then there is the rare situation when you have hired someone who just cannot do the job adequately. They are not bad workers but their skill set does not match the job. That is on you, not them, and you owe them your best efforts to move them to an area where they can excel. One of my young engineers was earnest and dedicated but the work was just outside his level of competence. Our projects were extremely complex and just because he had a chemical engineering degree did not mean he had a facile enough mind to keep up with the rest of the team. I was able to convince him to transfer to a very important department where mentally balancing multiple equations at the same time was not a requirement. He was hesitant but reluctantly agreed to the move. He was awesome at it and a few years later was running a major department in his new specialty at a sister facility. He would tell you now that it was the best thing that ever happened in his career. Many managers would have fired him and in so doing they would have thrown away a friend and a huge company asset.
Finally you need to fight to get your people promoted within your company, even if they may get ahead of you in the food chain. Of my two best team members over my career both first worked for me and I later worked for them and then finally one worked for me again. We stayed friends through it all and did our best to promote each other’s careers. There are many twists and turns in a career, some people see it as a fail when they do not get every possible promotion. But if you trust and appreciate a team member then when they win it is a win for you too because you trained them.

Have fun! This is pretty big. In fact my intern that modeled her leadership style after mine remembers the fun we all had more than anything else. It was little things like constant pranking. Not mean spirited, nothing gender specific and mostly nerd humor but we had a blast. I remember in the early days of powerful personal computers we had a big new one arrive and it had an odd quirk in that the wiring to the speakers would actually receive radio signals. This was a bug and not a feature. If you touched the case in a certain place you became part of an antennae and the radio broadcast of one particular station would come through very audibly but if you moved your hand it would revert to silence. I decided to convince one of my team members that all computers had a radio built into them (this was before wifi so they definitely did not have radios in them). I wrote a piece of ridiculous code that did nothing except send random things to the screen and I got my team member to come watch. I’d run the program, which did nothing, and then touch the case without him noticing and the music would play. I gave him a copy of the “program” and he spent days trying to figure out why he couldn’t get any other computer to receive radio stations. It was hilarious watching him try to convince others he could turn their PC’s into a radio. OK, you’d have had to be there. But we operated like a family, we went on vacations together and had mutual hobbies in the department with team members. We helped each other move, went to family events and genuinely liked each other. The most common sound heard in our part of the building was loud laughter, it is my best memory of those days!

So that is it for what I learned in three decades of working with teams. A few paragraphs does not look like much but there really is a pretty narrow space between a successful, highly paid career and an average one. I had the former and so did most of my team members and I sincerely believe the few concepts I shared here made all the difference in the world.

I was feeling a little smug last week, have to admit that. My net worth and my investment portfolio were closing in fast on new all time highs! My spouse and I were heading out on a two day drive to Breckenridge CO for some skiing and there were no worries to be found. Now back in the condo after a day of glorious powder I checked the market and to be mild it dropped like a boat anchor today. Added to last week’s losses my investments are $110,000 lower than they were one week ago. Fortunately as a slightly early retired couple our portfolio is less than half equities so the loss could have been much higher. My brother, also slightly early retired looks like a genius because he texted me last Tuesday that he was going to cash with a big part of his portfolio and he got the trades made right before things started to go mideval on my net worth.

Most of you have experienced something similar as investors these last few days. You may be early on in your journey to FI and if so rejoice! You lost little and will get some discounted prices. Or you may be already at FI and already early retired and this market bobble might be a particularly hard sting to your peace of mind. That is precisely where I am and I watched myself react to see if I really believed all the things I’ve said to others about investing. And…I passed. I actually got a wry smile on my face when I checked the indices for a couple of reasons. First because I’m not losing anything if I don’t sell. And second because my portfolio is diversified, doesn’t have exaggerated cap weighting and can handle a blip, or a correction or even a historic bear market. And I have to say I was pretty happy I didn’t have any exposure to crypto currency just now.

So is this a speedbump, a genuine correction starting or is the fabled bear coming out of hibernation to visit? Nobody knows, it is fair to say that as of Monday afternoon on the 5th of February, 2018 Wall Street looks to have another down day tomorrow. If the futures markets are correct, there is already blood in Tuesday’s streets. But profits are strong, the tax package will make them even stronger so there is every chance this is just a speed bump in another good year or two of equity growth. However price to equity ratios are quite high and the bond interest rates appear to be creeping toward business borrowing depressing levels so that’s a downside. Of the many indicators out there of future prosperity you can find one you like if you look hard enough.

The real question to ask yourself that you can actually answer is how did you react to the market suddenly acting like it has always acted, outside of the last few years? Were you OK with the way it felt, did it make you feel good about your investment strategies and your FI or FIRE plans? Or were you distraught and kicking yourself because you weren’t my brother and weren’t able to time the market with precision? This little slice of history is a perfect time to evaluate your risk tolerance. If you can’t avoid a knee jerk reaction to unexpected market moves then perhaps you need to reevaluate your plan. Personally when I made my own investment decisions I found days like today caused me angst, pain and fear. Now that I have three managers handling parts of my portfolio and I’m hands off my own money I felt no real pain at all. Today might be the day that some of you decide to turn to a financial planner or a financial advisor yourself, or it might be the day you take your money back into your own hands to manage.

It would be interesting to know what the last few days felt like to you. And whether that provided you an insight into your own thoughts about your journey to financial independence and perhaps early retirement. Please let me know. Now as for me I’m expecting 10 to 15 inches of fresh powder tomorrow here in Breck, something that the weather guys are actually fairly decent at predicting. Maybe we should let them try to model the stock market?

So you just got promoted and now you are leading a team. First, congratulations! One of the fastest ways to FIRE is to accelerate your income and one of the fastest ways to do that is to move up into the management ranks. As someone who did just that during a corporate career ending up with over seven hundred employees on my teams, I intended to someday share the things I learned and borrowed that seemed to work.

But I did not plan to make this post so early in my fledgling blogging career until something happened a couple of weeks ago that changed my plans. A profoundly meaningful event overtook me by surprise. It had nothing to do with the new year of 2018 or resolutions or goals. Instead it reached back twenty years or more into my past.

A friend was in town, an engineer who had briefly worked for me as an intern at the plant when she was still in college getting her chemical engineering degree. I was in my first management position in those days running a group of eight young engineers and a few paid interns. Since graduation she has worked at a major chemical corporation out of state but she was back in our little town visiting family and friends. She had looked me up just to tell me in person that she was now managing a young group of engineers and interns very much like mine when we worked together.

But what she said next was one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever gotten, something unexpected and wondrous. She said that she loved her job and that her model and her daily goal was to lead her team exactly the way I had led mine. She said that it was so much fun it didn’t seem like work at all to be a part of our team. She said that I was the best boss she had ever worked for and she just wanted me to know. That’s big to me, so affirming!

I hate opening this post this way because I know it sounds like the least humble brag imaginable and that isn’t my point. I’m thrilled to get feedback that I was not a terrible manager, it is the kind of thing that lights us older guys up in a way I could not begin to communicate to a younger version of myself. But the reason for the story is that it spurred me to take some time to ask myself, why was that such a great time in my life and hers? What exactly did I do as a manager to not suck the life out of my people and to not kill their spirits as seems to be all too common then and now?

I think any ideas I can share within this community on leading and managing teams and departments could be useful stuff for young millennials entering into management for the first time. So here is everything I can remember that worked to create a little happy and successful Camelot of a department of incredible young professionals. Very few of these are Steveark originals, I tried to steal from only the very best.

This got kind of lengthy so I’m putting in two parts, here is Part 1.

Treat Everyone as an Equal
Sure you just got promoted to be the boss/leader/manager but why would you think that makes you of any higher value than the newest or least paid employee in the company? It doesn’t, all that promotion means is that the bar just got raised for you and now you need to step up your game to an even higher level than the one that got you promoted in the first place. It is a verifiable fact that everyone on your team knows some things that you don’t know and is better at some parts of the job than you will ever be. Do not ever see yourself as being better than your team, you just have a different job description. It is not just a matter of what you do, you have to believe in your core that your team members are just as valuable and their hopes and dreams and fears matter just as much as yours do. You cannot fake this, if you don’t feel this deep in your heart then you need to find another job.

Hire Talent, You Cannot Teach It
I don’t care if you are Nick Saban (arguably best college football coach ever even if I am an Arkansas fan), you cannot win with a team of “C” class players. Happy productive teams need “A” class talent, not in every position but in most of them. This can be tough because as a new manager you probably did not get to hire your team, they were already there. But over time you may get to have some say in bringing new people in. Realize that picking talented people that can play nicely with others is the most important thing you can do to win in the corporate world. Your future promotions depend far more on the talent of your team than they do on your own talent.

Understand Your Job
As the team leader your job is no longer the job that got you promoted. It is perverse and counter intuitive at first, I know, but your job is to get excellence out of your team and most likely that will limit the amount of work product you get to produce yourself. That can be frustrating because you know you are good, it is why you got put in charge, and now you do not have time to spend on what you were so good at. Frustrating, sure, get over it! Once you learn to focus on building the capability of your team and improving the quality and quantity of their work and their overall enjoyment of the team’s mission and their engagement with the company they will absolutely blow the tiny amount of work you used to be able to produce on your own out of the water. When it is working like it should some days on your commute home you will realize you did not do any work at all. You just helped others get their work done, that is when you know you have got it going on!

Fight for Your People
If you are getting this then you now realize that your success is no longer going to be based on your ability to produce work. It is completely in the hands of your team. That is what management and leadership is, getting sustainable results out of people. To do that you have to have a team that trusts you, loves you and wants to win for you. And to do that you have to be a leader that trusts them, loves them and wants them to win individually and together. So you fight to get them raises much harder than you fight to get one yourself. If you elevate them then your compensation will take care of itself generally. Give them full credit, maybe even too much credit for their work. Don’t you dare put your name on their work and pass it off as yours. If you have to have your name on the report or you have to give the presentation based on their work because of company protocol you make sure you write or speak the full name of the person who did the work and compliment the work they did in front of everyone at the meeting. You want the CEO to know you’ve got a talented team, it is the kind of thing that lights up young talent and makes them happy and it really helps when you are fighting to get them more money if the top dogs know who they are! And if worse comes to worse, which it will at times, fight to keep their jobs in the face of a layoff. Make a case as to why your team needs every member, let them hunt elsewhere for sacrificial lambs. You may not, probably will not win that fight but they are your people. Fight like they matter to you because they should.

Train Your Team
We sent every team member to at least one out of state seminar or class every year. Sometimes they went to several. I heard old guard managers grumble that if you train them that well then someone will want to hire them away. How incredibly ignorant that view is! People do not leave jobs because they have employable skills, they leave their jobs because they fear they are becoming unemployable. If you train them in the latest greatest of whatever it is they do then you give them the confidence that they can get a job anywhere. Paradoxically that makes it much less likely they will even look for another job. And it is not just the information they will learn that builds this confidence but the network they build from interfacing with other companies at these events.

The other thing we did, and I did steal this idea from a mentor, was to wait for the aging giants in our sector to retire from competitors or large engineering companies and then to hire them to come in and teach my young engineers the absolute best practices they had developed over their 40 year careers. I do not know of anyone else that did this but we gained incredible guidelines, principles, practices, procedures and ideas that we never could have come up with on our own. Every sector has a few Einstein’s and they are eventually retired by their companies. They often still feel they have useful knowledge and sometimes they are thrilled to feed young minds. We were careful to stay away from proprietary information and patents. I just wanted to expose my young padawans to Jedi masters and the way they thought. It was big! I am still sharing many of the ideas I was taught by these masters in my consulting side gigs today. And I still cannot fathom why more companies do not do this.

But Wait, There’s More!
Indeed there is and I’ll put it in a post in the very near future! The second and concluding installment of the very few things I may have done right in my early 9 to 5 career. But first I’m headed to Colorado to ski for a week, if I post from there it will probably be about new powder!