The guy in the corner - a leadership story
While many of my leadership stories come from my professional roles, this one is personal and profoundly impacts how I view leadership.
This story is about the guy in the corner, which might not make much sense right now, but stay with me.
This story took place several years ago in Ata Rangi, the maternity ward of my local hospital. I was in labour, I was following my birth plan and things were progressing well, or so I thought. My son’s head was delivered. But the rest of him didn’t follow. He was stuck. We went from the relatively peaceful environment, of myself, my husband and my midwife to a room full of people helping to get my son unstuck. The number of people, the light and the activity were quite overwhelming. I vividly remember looking across the room and seeing a guy standing in the corner. He was wearing a white coat, so I knew he was supposed to be there, he was calmly watching the clock and “counting time”.
I later discovered that he was probably the most senior person in the room - he had a view over everything happening. Still, he wasn’t actively involved in any one thing and he was literally counting out the minutes that had passed. He got to 5 minutes, but not 6 as my son was delivered between the 5th and 6th minute of stuckness. And we all survived to tell the story.
The guy in the corner stayed in my mind and I often reflected on his leadership in a crisis. He was calm, kept an overall view of what was happening, wasn’t distracted by a particular task, allowed his team to be the experts in their task, and created safety for them to get their job done knowing he was the one watching the clock.
Another later discovery was that they were working to a 12-minute timeframe, apparently after that drastic steps were required to deliver the baby. I’m pleased I didn’t have to experience that.
Often as leaders - particularly in crises, we feel we need to be “leading the charge”, taking the action required and fixing the problem. The story of “The Guy in the Corner” is a beautiful example of how leadership should work. The leader has an overall view of what is happening and allows his team to work cohesively - each taking care of the action they need to perform while knowing their leader has their back and will let them know if things are not going according to plan.
His calmness impacted me.
I thought about what I had experienced and how I could bring this into my leadership.
I was quickly presented with an opportunity. I started a new role with Ravensdown and discovered my predecessor had been writing all the Business Cases for CAPEX (Capital Expenditure Request). My predecessor would get the project lead to pass all the relevant information to him, he would write the business case and take it through the approval process. After a discussion with my team, we decided to see what it would look like to change this. Instead of me writing the business case, I got the project lead to write it. I could then review it before taking it through the CAPEX process. The benefit of this was two-fold the project lead learned how to write a business case and my time was freed from this task.
I quickly saw the benefit of this approach. We needed to upgrade our air compression system. The project lead wrote the business case for me to review. Now attention to detail is not one of my strengths, I know that “tick box” exercises can catch me out - so rather than read and release, I treated this exercise like I was the guy in the corner. I’m pleased I did because I managed to catch a discrepancy in a unit of measurement that impacted the entire project. Maybe I would have picked this up if I’d written the Business Case - but I think it was the distance I’d created between myself and the task that allowed me to see the issue.
Create perspective by distancing yourself from the task.
How do you lead?
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