Minute With Mallon: Necessary Leadership Toughness đź‘Š
Welcome to Minute with Mallon!
Before we get started, I have an exciting opportunity to share with you for January 2024.
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Something I Taught:
Recently, my wife Sandy and I drove down to Atlanta to watch a concert. We spent the night in Midtown. The day after the concert, we decided to drive around Downtown Atlanta. Back in 1988, I ran a high-volume restaurant there. I pulled in the parking lot, got out, and walked around the building. A flood of memories came back to me.
I had gotten a promotion there from Miami, and within days I realized I'd taken over a zoo. There were over 110 employees, and during the first 60 days I fired 60 of them. Not to go into too many details, but my life was threatened several times and one of my assistants was assaulted in a stairwell by the daytime dishwasher. I also inherited an administrative assistant who was arrested one morning by the FBI for forgery and child molestation. 🙄
Life sucked for those first 6 months. It was one problem after another, but we finally got it turned around.
Fast forward to last month.
I was working with a client who had a problem employee. The employee kept promising to change their behavior but didn't. My client hadn't been forceful enough in sticking to his guns and had allowed this behavior to continue over time. He was frustrated, upset with himself, and concerned how the employee's lack of change might affect other employees. So he decided to have another conversation with the employee and address the problem behaviors one last time.
I coached him through what to say and then suggested that he use this phrase that I used back on 1987 (and several times after…) to take it to the next level:
"If you continue to drive me crazy, I might just start envisioning a career-ending move for you."
They were sitting in a conference room. He delivered the sentence, held eye contact for a few seconds, then got up and walked away.
Not surprisingly, the employee sensed the escalation, and immediately made the necessary changes. He has reported back that she's doing a good job now and the problem seems to be a thing of the past.
Sometimes you have to be direct. Hopefully not often, but sometimes you need to make sure you’ve got their attention.
Remember the above phrase. It may come in handy at some point in your career.
Something I Learned:
This year I read a book called Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools by Tyler Staton. Here's a passage where he discusses how we see our problems as being enormous, but often we're not looking at them from God's perspective.
If we think of the Milky Way galaxy as being the size of the entire continent of North America, our solar system would fit into a coffee cup. Two Voyager spacecrafts are cruising toward the edge of the solar system at a rate of more than 35,000 miles per hour. They’ve been doing that for more than forty years and have traveled more than 11 billion miles, with no end in sight. When NASA sends communication to one of those Voyagers traveling at that velocity, it takes about seventeen hours to get there. That data has led scientists to estimate that to send a “speed of light” message to the edge of the universe would take more than 15 billion years to arrive.
Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God's point of view. God is the one who calls us to, "be still, and know that I am God."
For some reason, waiting in line at Walmart doesn't seem like that big of a deal anymore… đź¤
Something to Ponder:
Boring means your imagination is broken.
Apollo Robbins
Something I Saw:
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Until next week,
Robert
