The Ride Home

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Hello, Friends! Twenty years is long enough that I should have forgotten this. I haven't, and I've come to think the reason I haven't is the whole point. We start here.

Early in my first district manager role at Wachovia, my leader asked me to share my weekly calendar with her.

She asked because she asked every new district manager for theirs. She wanted to see how the job was actually landing on the person doing it — where the days were going, what was eating the hours, whether there was something she could take off the pile. It was a generous thing to do, and she did it as a matter of course, the way you'd check on anyone you'd just handed something heavy.

I want you to have that before we go any further, because I didn't. She said it plainly, in one of our first one-on-ones, and it took her about four seconds. I said of course. Neither of us thought about it again — she because there was nothing to think about, and I because I was already thinking about something else entirely.

I should say more about her before we go on, because the rest of this doesn't land if you have her wrong.

Later that year I had some feedback for a peer — someone I respected, and someone I had no idea how to approach. She sat with me and worked through what I wanted to say until I could actually say it. Then she told me the date by which I had to say it. That was the thing I hadn't expected. She didn't treat the coaching as finished when I understood it. She treated it as finished when I'd done it. She stretched me further than anyone I'd worked for, and a good deal of it came from her declining to let me off. I learned more from her than from anyone before or since. I've been grateful for it a long time, and I'm not sure I ever told her.

I was twenty-seven. That was young for the seat, and I knew it every time I walked into a branch where someone had been managing people since before I finished college. I had fifteen branches spread across Los Angeles. I'd moved there the year before, from a city where my salary had meant something entirely different, and I was still doing the sums on rent every month with a feeling I can only describe as bracing.

None of that was on the calendar. What was on the calendar was fifteen locations in a city that does not permit it — and I already suspected the schedule made me look like I hadn't figured out how to do the job.

So when she asked to see it, I didn't hear a leader asking how the work was going.

I heard someone asking to see the evidence.

The job required a ton of driving. Fifteen branches across the South Bay — Culver City, Torrance, Downey, Long Beach — which on a map looks like a manageable piece of one city and in practice is not. Three branches on a good day, four if the timing broke right, and between each one a stretch of freeway that took as long as the visit itself. I drove an old Honda Accord with a book playing through the speakers, which is what I told myself I was doing with all that time. Learning something. Making it useful.

I wasn't hearing a word of it.

What I was doing was going back over the calendar she'd asked for, line by line, and imagining how it looked to someone who hadn't driven the 405 at four in the afternoon. Culver City at nine, Torrance at eleven-thirty. Two and a half hours of freeway for an hour of actual work. I knew why the gaps were there. She didn't — and I never once thought to tell her, because telling her would have meant admitting there was something to explain.

So I explained it to her in my head instead, at fifteen miles an hour, for weeks. I built her side of the conversation and I argued with it. I had answers ready for questions she never asked. Somewhere between Downey and Long Beach the argument would usually arrive at the same place: she's asked for this because she's already decided something about me, and I'm going to spend the next six months finding out what it is.

The drives between branches were where I built it, and the ride home was where it set — those were the longest, since I was working later than I needed to and didn't yet know there was another way to run a week, and by then there was nothing left to think about that I hadn't already thought a dozen times over.

And underneath that, the part that actually kept me up. I'd been in Los Angeles a year. My rent had nearly tripled from what I'd paid in Winston-Salem, and I'd arranged a life around a salary I'd had for about eleven months. If she'd already decided, then everything I'd moved across the country for was sitting on the outcome of a conversation I hadn't been invited to yet.

Three weeks went by and she said nothing about the calendar.

Which I took as confirmation.

Then, in a one-on-one, she asked if she could offer some feedback.

I said of course. I had been ready for this for three weeks.

She told me I was doing a good job — she was specific about it, which I'd stopped expecting. Then she said she'd noticed I was visiting all fifteen branches every week, and asked whether they all needed me the same amount. My newest branch and my two struggling ones did. My strongest managers, running the strongest branches, almost certainly did not. She suggested I go every other week to the ones that were working, and stay longer when I did. Then she said I should look at my geography again, because I'd been laying out my week around considerations that mattered less than the driving, and the driving was taking my evenings.

She said she asked all her new district managers for their calendars, because it was the fastest way to find out where the job was going sideways on someone before they'd tell her.

That was the whole of it. It took her a few minutes.

I remember saying thank you. I don't remember what else I said, and I suspect I didn't say much, because I was busy doing something I've since come to recognize — running back through three weeks of freeway and rewriting every one of those drives with the information I now had.

Here's what I keep coming back to. She was right about all of it, and knowing it cost her nothing.

She knew why she'd asked. The question of her intent was settled before she opened her mouth — same one she'd had for every district manager before me, unremarkable and generous and completely obvious from where she stood. There was nothing in the ask for her to wonder about. That's why it took four seconds.

I got the same four seconds without the reason attached. And what I did with the gap was fill it, because that's what we do with a gap. We don't leave it empty. We furnish it with the most plausible story we've got on hand. Mine came out of being twenty-seven in a job usually held by someone older, being a year into a city I couldn't afford to fail in, and a lifetime of practice checking whether I was safe. Given that inventory, what I built wasn't irrational. It was a reasonable conclusion drawn from the evidence I had, which was no evidence at all.

She's one of the two or three leaders who shaped how I work, and I'd say that under oath. She challenged me, she was specific with her praise, and she was looking at my calendar for the express purpose of making my life easier. All of that is true, and none of it changed what those three weeks were like. That's what I've never been able to square — the cost didn't come from anyone doing anything wrong. It came from an explanation that never got said, because the one person who had it had no way to know it was needed.

She left that one-on-one believing she'd given a new district manager his evenings back, which she had. She never knew about the three weeks before it, and there was no version of that conversation where she would have.

I've been asking people for things for twenty years now, and the reason has been obvious to me every single time.

A few months ago I asked someone on my team to help me find the parts of their work that could be simplified — the operational things landing on their desk that didn't need to land there. I wanted to take some of it away so they could spend their time on the work only they could do, which is considerable. I knew that when I asked. I knew it so completely that I didn't think to say it.

What they heard was that I was looking for ways to make their job smaller.

I found that out, eventually, and I was able to say what I'd meant. It landed differently in the second telling, though never quite the way it would have in the first. And that would be the tidy end of it, except that finding out is what I can't get past. That one came back to me. I have no idea how many haven't. I ask for things constantly — a number, a document, thirty minutes on a Thursday — and each of those has a reason so plain to me that it doesn't occur to me to attach it.

Twenty years ago I sat on a freeway building a case against someone who was trying to give me my evenings back. I know exactly what that gap feels like from the inside, and it turns out that knowing doesn't reliably get to me in the moment I'm the one asking. It got there once, months late, because someone was willing to tell me.

The seat makes it worse. The more senior I've gotten, the more a simple request can come to mean something — and the less likely anyone is to walk into my office and ask me what I meant by it.

And it didn't stay in the car. Whatever I'd built between Long Beach and Culver City came into the house with me, and it got told at least as often as it got thought. That's what these stories do — they don't stay in the car. They arrive at a table, and the people around it, who have never met the leader in question, form a picture and keep it.

That's the part I've never been able to put down. Not that anyone did anything to me. Just that a reason can be so obvious to the person who has it that it never occurs to them it's the only thing missing — and by the time anyone finds out, the story has already been told to people who will never hear the correction.

"The story your people tell when you're not in the room is your truest legacy." — MB

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