Last week, I had the pleasure of meeting a new client: a company’s new CEO had hired me to train his executive team on working on the business versus working in the business.
Boom! No problem; that concept is what we coach people on every day at Pregame. Still, I had pre-performance nerves. It was my first time teaching this content in this particular format, and my first time training in person since the first pandemic stay-home order.
Having been at this for awhile, I knew my apprehension was the healthy type that we get anytime we expand our comfort zone. Performance adrenaline ultimately serves the performance.
The real nerves came from my perception of the split state of our states right now: Would people in their conservative city be vaccinated? Would this coastal liberal say something too left wing for a heartland agriculture business? Would someone on their team say something that threw me off my game?
This was the anxiety of leaving my bubble; something I’ve been consciously trying to do more over the past year, whether attempting to see the United States from the outside or initiating difficult conversations out of sincere curiosity and hope that underneath the current polarization, we have values and humanity that connect us.
The training couldn’t have gone better. The team was amazing and they latched onto the concepts faster than most. Win!
But the real gift was dinner with the team on the first night; something that doesn’t happen often in business anymore, at least in my hyper-efficient startup bubble.
About halfway through the dinner, I realized it was a kind of interview; they were getting to know me as part of their decision to continue working with Pregame as their executive team coach. A little nerve-wracking, again, but also incredibly charming. It was so nice to go beyond the workshop warmup questions and get to know people who drive food production, an industry in which I have almost no professional experience but affects me every single day.
I sat next to the founder, who had built the business from the ground up with his father for over 30 years. When I asked how they came to open a production facility in Central America, he told me the story of his father getting a hot tip on the opportunity via the owner of his favorite donut shop.
“We had this pot of money,” he said humbly. “While we could have opened the facility here, we asked, ‘Where can we do the most good?’ Now instead of just a few families, we help over 100 families with jobs and livelihoods every day.”
He continued to tell stories of providing tangible help to far less fortunate people thousands of miles away: paying for a child’s surgery, helping people negotiate a new self-sustaining economic opportunity for their town.
What struck me was that these stories were nowhere on their website. They hadn’t told them publicly, but the team knew. The publicist in me wanted to encourage them to do PR around it or at least blog (looks like I couldn’t resist that last one), but I realized that it wasn’t about the accolades. It was about doing the right thing, feeling integrity within oneself, and ultimately using the platform of business for the greater good, something I very much believe in.
In the startup culture where I usually hang out, founders do very little good without making it a PR play. On the one hand, I’m in favor of actual good being done regardless of the motive, but what really ends up happening is the bare minimum required to get props.
Ideas get far too much credit when they haven’t been backed up by execution and results. Once they’ve been written up in the Business Journal, it’s on to the next trendy cause. It’s easy to hire a minority candidate, for example, but it’s not easy to create an ongoing workplace culture of equal opportunity.
What you do is more important than what you get recognized for doing.
Thanks to an unexpected dinner conversation in a state that I wouldn’t otherwise have visited and people I never would have otherwise met, I’m inspired to make my own business better and my motives more pure.
That’s the other lesson here; one that may be unpalatable for my fellow progressives and those of us who have been historically sidelined: there are good men out there. There are good white men. There are good old white men. What if we weren’t so quick to write them off?
I’m tired of assuming that people from other demographics are automatically suspect, because it’s exhausting and it makes me miserable and ultimately, it doesn’t work for building reality-based solutions. So kum-ba-f’ing-ya, I’m going to work on listening more and expecting the best. From everyone.
And when there comes a point where I have the opportunity to share my point of view and the actions my own values inspire me to take, I’ll bet the farm that my new friend will be more likely to listen.