The Recipe to Seasoned Leadership: Basic Ingredients to Transform Your Work Presence

By Darrin S. McCall

Does your daily work feel like someone is handing you a box of ingredients and expecting a gourmet dinner in return? The only problem is, they have put you in the kitchen with no recipe. You are on your own. If you are not a seasoned chef, it may not turn out so well until you build your knowledge, or someone shares their wisdom with you. In ord

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manuscripts LLC
• Release date: Jun 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9798889260691

Book preview

The Recipe to Seasoned Leadership

Basic Ingredients to Transform Your Work Presence

Darrin S. McCall

Copyright © 2024 Darrin S. McCall

All rights reserved.

The Recipe to Seasoned Leadership

Basic Ingredients to Transform Your Work Presence

ISBN

979-8-88926-070-7 Paperback

979-8-88926-069-1 Ebook

979-8-88926-071-4 Hardcover

To my loving wife, Andrea, the saint who has endured my many adventures and never faltered along the way. Thank you for your patience while I made my dream of writing this book come true. I am forever grateful.

—Darrin

Contents

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INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1

The Attribute(s)

Chapter 2

Wants, Will, Won’t

Chapter 3

Accountable

Chapter 4

Consistent

Chapter 5

Ethical

Chapter 6

Supportive

Chapter 7

Communicator

Chapter 8

Fair

Chapter 9

Honest

Chapter 10

Passionate

Chapter 11

Committed

Chapter 12

Visionary

Chapter 13

Where to Next?

Conclusion

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Appendix

INTRODUCTION

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Those who swim in the sea of deceit can only reach shore by swimming with strokes of honesty.

—Darrin S. McCall, 11/01/2011

Over the last one hundred years, the American employment sector has shifted from a world of factory assembly lines and physical labor—collectively down 70 percent—to one where most people perform retail services or toil for large corporations—collectively up 218 percent.¹ In that transition, employees began deceiving themselves into believing the measure of their success was hitting quarterly financial numbers or aligning with corporate initiatives versus being an employee who is virtue driven and performance resolute.

This created a two-sided trap for employees: employees believed the company’s leadership was doing the right things for them, and employees felt as if they were doing the right thing for their companies with their compliance. This veil of deception grows each passing year as companies continue to demand more from employees with less insights into personal awareness and development.

Why is this? Simple. In the past, leaders and employees had a closer relationship. The factory workers in the 1900s often had a leader who was one of them, someone who at one point showed ambition while working on the shop floor, had a leader take them under their wing and mentor them, and then eventually moved into a leadership role.

Although not the norm, internal promotions still happen today with the likes of Chris Rondeau, the CEO of Planet Fitness, who started as a part-time front desk employee while in college. Ten years later, he was the COO of Planet Fitness.² Personal awareness and fortitude drive employees to move up from the ground floor of an organization. These employees also have leaders who support them and cultivate excellence.

Family-owned businesses offer another example of a natural employee to leader equivalency. Strong leadership figures have passed the operational insights down to their children, grandchildren, and family relatives. Companies like Walmart, Dell Computers, and the Ford Motor company are generational companies that have had success with this type of organization structure.³

Generational companies are not always successful, but those that have descendants who have been ingrained with day-to-day operations at a young age, have strong mentors, and show high business acumen are often selected to run a portion of the company early in their careers. Deception is often not found in this type of organization, as the family sees the highs and lows of every transaction and shares them together.

The common thread that unites the two examples is the mentor, who is quite often referred to as a seasoned employee or leader.⁴ The seasoned employees are employees who invest in the well-being of others, have been exposed to countless business situations, and overcome their own shortfalls to lead vigilantly. Seasoned leaders know how to deal with the personal side of employees (Emotional Intelligence, or EQ) because they know the work their employees are doing and the strains it has on their lives.

In our current business state, leaders rotate in and out of jobs and industries so often, they have no idea what challenges front line workers face. Seasoned employees know the pain points of employee job requirements and can assist leaders in navigating corporate programs that only frustrate employees.

Seasoned employees comprehend their business with a holistic frame of mind. They can understand the services required by the customer and can traverse the company’s internal matrixes to solve the needs of employees and customers alike. Seasoned employees have an intrinsic desire to perform the work they enjoy and readily support others who want the same outcome. They are the reflection of Albert Einstein’s quote, Try not to become a man of success—but rather a man a value.⁵

Seasoned employees bring constant value to any organization or profession they work within. I know when I was transitioning jobs at one point in my career, I looked at jobs outside the health care sector. I questioned myself about why I would take another role in a field where I could not fulfill my own desire to improve the quality of health care for patients and care providers. I knew where my value was, and I needed to stay where I could support and influence others on the same journey.

Seasoned employees share a level of inspiration with others through their own humility. They prompt fellow employees to accomplish tasks that were thought to be impossible. They accomplish this by creating a vision where everyone can visualize success and desires to be a part of that group. Seasoned employees are not afraid to take the first step of the journey and can rally a team like Mel Gibson’s William Wallace in Braveheart.⁶ Will you take the charge with them or step away and see what happens?

Their company stance is based on morally sound principles, which are clearly known regarding every aspect of the corporate culture, and this may cause unsolicited distress in certain organizations. But this type of stewardship is needed in companies to help maintain administrative governance and a commitment to objective advocacy without retaliation. Companies believe they are developing seasoned employees through their corporate training programs, but they are just creating more yes people. Seasoned employees are few and far between these days, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

The first step to cultivating a new generation of seasoned employees is to have honest conversations with ourselves, our peers, and our companies that renew a desire to improve outcomes for everyone. I wrote the opening quote in the later part of 2011 during a period of extreme churn in my business life. As much as I wanted that statement to be a direct reflection of the company, I was failing to understand how much I was to blame for my frustration. I was deceiving myself on what I thought the company wanted in me and from me. I couldn’t have been further from reality. The company talked innovation, breakthrough, and out-of-the-box thinking, but what they really wanted was compliance with their policies and objectives.

Like many companies from 2008 to 2011, my company was going through a difficult transition. The impact of the 2008 financial crisis had rippled around the world and even made its way in the generally stable health care sector, causing a lot of uncertainty and stress. Unemployment rates had hit close to 10 percent at the end of 2009, and companies were trying to keep employee effectivity and workload capacity high while limiting the number of people working.⁷ Along with that was the start of the diversity push at large corporate companies, creating a period of uncertain leadership transitions that would have its own ripple effect.⁸

At the same time, I was clashing with my own internal ideals on ethics, accountability, and honesty while trying to stay invested in the direction we were going. I wanted to be honest with the company and for the company to be honest with me about what was happening, but I did not have a way to make that happen. In the period from 2007 through 2012, I had five different leaders. Yes, that is about one per year over that time. Putting that in perspective, the average person will hold twelve different jobs over their lifetime. That would correlate to about twelve new managers over a forty-year career.⁹ I had encountered almost half the lifetime number of new managers in less than an eighth of my working career.

Every new manager brought their own work habits and idiosyncrasies from their past businesses, which did not always transfer well to health care. We lost our personal touch with our field teams, managers, and leadership. Business became a numbers game every quarter. How much did you do for me this quarter? Good. Go do more next quarter.

The vision of providing health care services was being lost in translation between short-term thinking and finding ways to deliver results at any cost. It finally broke me down to the point where I wrote that saying. Six months after penning that phrase, I spoke honestly to my manager, and shortly after, they asked me to move on. The request did not bother me because I knew I was on solid ground, and they were still swimming in their own sea of deception.

My quote rings even more true today than it did back then and possibly on a grander scale if you look at current politics, economics, health care, and the world’s social actions. Unfortunately, we have lost the art of having impactful conversations that develop well-rounded wisdom in employees, much like conversations that are held between seasoned mentors and their mentees. In the chapters that follow, you will find the way to begin a process of self-discovery, open lines of communication, and baseline your current seasoning level.

To add a bit more seasoning—pun intended—to the process, I have mixed herbs and spices into the concept being introduced. The spices are designed to create a mental picture of the idea presented in each chapter that will transform your work presence. As with all cooking, getting the right amount of seasoning is very important to the final dish. Too much of one or too little of another, and the dish can become inedible. Getting the right balance is the secret to your success.

Now is the time to start swimming toward shore, walk on solid ground, and engage in some honest conversations that will spice up the way we work. Let’s get started.

Chapter 1

The Attribute(s)

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noun

: a quality, character, or characteristic ascribed to someone or something

A common premise is that employees leave managers more than the company they work for, and there may be some truth to that. In a 2022 survey by the background verification company, GoodHire, 82 percent of full-time US employees said they would potentially quit their job due to a bad manager. Plus, only 32 percent of respondents felt their managers really care about their career progression.¹

This substantiates the point that the right leader and teammates can have an overwhelming impact on the decisions made by an employee to stay or leave a company. The Gallup Organization further substantiates this, stating, Managers—more than any other factor—influence team engagement and performance. That’s not an exaggeration: 70 percent of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager.²

This raises the question, when it comes to working for a company, should a person be looking more at the company or the people they will work with or under? The aforementioned surveys would indicate people are much more important. The company merely becomes a vessel to which we apply our trade, skills, or desires, and the employees create the culture into which everyone integrates to accomplish the organization’s goals. Given that everyone has different personalities, characteristics, and work habits, how does a person evaluate an organization to know if they will integrate well?

Finding details on an organization’s stocks performance, current products, and leadership changes is as easy as a Google search. Type in a name or topic, and a list of landing pages will appear outlining anything you want to know about any organization. Getting information is not the hard part; analyzing for a perfect fit is. A lot of subliminal and intangible factors are at play in this process. These unknown factors have a critical impact on the decision-making process, but what factors should we focus on and how should we measure them?

The classification of a diamond may shed some insights to this process. Several different factors or attributes come into play when we classify diamonds by the four C’s—weight (Carat), lack of defect (Clarity), tinge of color (Color), and angles used to shape (Cut).³ The diamond industry has created this series of one-word adjectives to convey a standardized definition and a rating scale for each characteristic or quality that defines a particular stone. Why would finding consistent attributes within an organization need to be different?

Much like the diamond dealers, organizations are trying to have employees conform to a certain set of criteria. Personality evaluations deliver insightful colors, four-letter codes, and