Last night I went to see a performance of an Irish Step Dance company of which one of my granddaughters is a member. During the course of the performance the group’s teacher and leader did a brilliant solo dance, and I recalled that the last time I had seen them she also danced, that time just as another member of the company in a set.
That made me recall reading some years ago the book Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy, then CEO of the famous and highly successful advertising agency of Ogilvy & Mather. David Ogilvy was a brilliant manager, known for such insightful quotations as “Hire people who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it.”
In his book he recalls working as a youngster in the kitchen of the Majestic Hotel in Paris under a great chef, whose name escapes me. He recalled that although the great chef managed a huge kitchen staff from his office, once a day he always came out and made something himself – a sauce, a special dish, a dessert – just to keep his skills up and be a model for his staff. That impressed Ogilvy, and when he himself was the CEO of the mighty Ogilvy & Mather advertising firm, he too always had at least one account that he managed personally, down to the last detail, for the same reason.
I once attended a large-format photography workshop taught by Fred Picker, a bit of a curmudgeon but a brilliant and talented photographer and printer. I recall him telling us to distrust any photography teacher who wasn’t actively producing work, or as he put it, “hanging them on the wall”.
The lesson here, I think, is that it is all too easy to rise to become a teacher or manager or leader of one’s profession, and then lose touch with the skills and difficulties of those working under you, and what is worse, to be perceived by those subordinates as having lost touch.
There is a reason why good generals spend a lot of time visiting and eating with their troops in the front lines, instead of just living in comfort well away from danger. It’s not just that their troops respect them more for it, though that is certainly important. It is that by being in the front lines from time to time they get accurate first-hand information about how things are really going, and their decisions are better for it. That applies in just about any other field of endeavor as well.
Teachers who themselves practice daily what they are teaching are better teachers. Organizations in which managers wander around a lot and join in and get their hands dirty with real work from time to time have better odds of long-term success than those in which managers rule in distant and isolated splendor from large offices, and the morale of their people will be markedly better as well.
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