My journey in business has taken me from the school of
hard knocks to the world of holistic leadership.
Along the way, I have witnessed the stubbornness of human
beings, the resiliency of individuals faced with difficult
professional challenges, and the joy of connecting—
really connecting—with people willing to
learn new ways of working and leading.
In this chapter, I share the New World Leadership model
and outline its capacity to transform how we do business
in order to achieve heightened commitment,
engagement and loyalty from stakeholders.
My Story
I was 38 years old when I was offered what I believed to be the career opportunity of a lifetime. During the previous 20 years, I had worked in the transportation industry in various capacities. I slowly had moved into management roles and was finding great interest in leading others. But this new opportunity was what I had been waiting for. It was 1998 and there were very few women running large transportation operations. I felt privileged to get this opportunity.
With my many years in the transportation sector, I was used to being the only female in a traditionally male industry. This did not concern me because now I would be the branch manager with significant autonomy and flexibility. I couldn't wait to get started.
Two business days prior to starting my new role, the departing manager asked me out for dinner. He was preparing to leave the city and move back home to take up a new position there. It was the Thursday evening prior to my start date on Monday morning. There would be no orientation or easing in period. He would leave for Calgary on Friday afternoon and I would start Monday morning. I was so excited.
During our dinner I could sense that Paul wanted to tell me something. We had a very nice meal and lots of small talk about the company and what I could expect corporately. Towards the end of the meal Paul quietly said, "You are going to hate it. This place is the most dysfunctional, angry and upsetting place to work. The employees hate the management and the management hate the employees. They are truly at war." I could not believe what he just said. But looking at him through my lovely rose-coloured glasses I simply said, "That is not possible. There is no way it could be that bad."
I would learn just how wrong I was.
The local branch had 225 employees (only four of them women), three managers, four lead hands and a sales team of four. All 225 employees were unionized through the same union and local, and we had two shop stewards. I genuinely believed there was no way a group of people could be as bad as Paul had described. It just wasn't possible. I had worked my entire 20-year career on the operations side of this industry and I had seen and experienced a lot, but never imagined what I was about to learn.
My introduction to the culture began slowly. My first walk through the warehouse required me to step over large gobs of spit mixed with sunflower seed shells. I was, to say the least, a little shocked. There was a sense of uneasiness about the place, but I did not let it bother me. I was determined to be a great manager—it was only a matter of time before I would have this place looking great. Call me naive.
As the first few weeks went by, I experienced a few comments that I thought were a bit inappropriate, but I didn't respond. For example, as I walked down the hall someone would quietly say, just within ear shot, "You'll never make it past 12 months." Or I might hear, "You are like all the rest. This should be fun."
It is helpful at this time to provide a little more context. I had worked within a unionized environment before, but I had never been the primary contact for ensuring a collective agreement was followed properly. I had handled many stage 1 grievances and a few at stage 2, but never before had I been the manager who would determine stage 2 and 3, along with the arbitration process. In my previous experiences as an operations manager, I had always had an HR department available to handle the difficult and escalated grievances. But this organization had a very small HR component and what was available was extremely limited and two provinces away. Many of the day-to-day decisions were made locally. By the branch manager. Me.
One Friday, close to the completion of my second month, I received 36 stage 2 grievances all on the same day. The rumour on the warehouse floor was that if they could find four more grievances and make it a nice round 40 in total, they could make me cry. Well. I couldn't tell anyone that I had been crying in my office since 10:30 that morning.
This was my new reality: Open Warfare. Employees did whatever they could to sabotage the efforts of management, and the managers and supervisors did what they could to sabotage the efforts of the union. It was a crazy place and I was in the middle of it.
In week 10, a chair was thrown at my office door by an employee who had been in a long and hard grievance with the previous manager and who wanted me to know just exactly how upset he was. There were many examples of extremely upset and angry people. I was in shock and disappointed by my situation, but I was also intrigued.
I kept asking myself, "How does a group of 225 employees become so angry and untrusting that they would collectively behave like this?" I had never experienced anything like it. The 80/20 rule wasn't applying at all: Work with the 80% of employees who want to do a good job and don't spend too much time trying to please the 20% who are really disgruntled. We had at least 95% of the unionized employees in complete anger and outrage most of the time, while the remaining 5% were not yet completely cynical.
By week 11, I had made two commitments to myself: First, try to understand what could have happened to make so many people so angry and hurt and disillusioned. Second, create a place from which to build trust and that would make people want to come to work again. These commitments put me on the journey of a lifetime. It wasn't easy, but it was rewarding.
It didn't take me long to figure out the answers to my first question: What happened to make so many people so unhappy? These employees had had four branch managers in six years, no consistency in approach or strategy, no clear direction. The culture at this branch was the culture the employees decided to create themselves, because they were the only consistent factor present. Rules were never consistently applied by the branch managers and, with little or no support from head office, they were left to manage however they wanted to. Some enjoyed meeting staff at the bar on Friday night. Others were strict disciplinarians. Still others were just not present; they would take extended time off golfing and doing whatever they felt like. I sensed that there had been little commitment to the people who did the actual work. Managers had not tried to connect with the employees as human beings, as real people who were just like them—just trying to feel they had made some progress by the end of each day.
My second commitment was to begin to build relationships, to find any way I could to make a connection with the human beings who worked in this building, many of whom had committed a significant portion of their lives to the organization. I started by delivering coffee.
Every Friday morning I would come in early and make large urns of coffee. I would put the urns on a trolley and go from overhead door to overhead door delivering coffee to the drivers. At first, they would not take the coffee, nor would they acknowledge me. I am not exaggerating; this is how bad it was. But after several weeks, slowly but surely they would take the coffee and say thanks. They wouldn't talk to me at first, but then gradually they would bring up work issues. It was more like complaining, but I was happy we were making a connection, even if it was simply to complain about something.
I tried really hard to get the staff to attend a meeting. This was next to impossible, so I decided that they needed an enticement. Am I the only manager who has driven through a McDonalds restaurant drive-thru window at 5:30am to order $350 worth of Egg McMuffins? Well, that is what I did once a month. In the beginning, the staff would leave the warehouse when they could smell the hot food, grab a sandwich and head right back into the warehouse. But slowly, ever so slowly, they began to hang back to hear what I had to say. Over 18 months, I watched a group of people slowly warm up and come to life. I began to see a small glimmer of hope that maybe we could build relationships enough to make some progress. My goal was to be fair and consistent, always consistent. I wanted them to know that I wasn't going anywhere, that I would always have time to hear what they had to say. I had to build even just a small amount of trust before anyone would consider anything that I had to say.
I remember one of our most disgruntled employees. He was always openly negative and vocal about how much he hated the place, but one day I saw progress. I had overheard one of the other employees mention that Sam and his wife had just had their first baby a few days earlier. I immediately went out, bought a card and wrote simple heartfelt congratulations, and I intentionally mailed the card to his home, through the postal service. His wife, at home with their new little one, received the card. The following week, Sam came into my office and said, "Thank you. I had no idea you even knew, and no one here has ever done anything like that for me and my wife." Imagine that; a simple human-to-human experience, which should have been so normal for people who worked together, was...
