Hello, Friends!
Welcome back. This one is lighter than the last few have been, and I've decided not to apologize for that. Some weeks the thing worth writing down is just a person who was good to you.
We start here.
In 2008, my regional leader made me an offer. If I could take my district's client survey scores to an all-time high, she'd give me tickets to see Celine Dion.
I'd like to report that I weighed this against my other professional priorities. I did not. This was Los Angeles, the show was coming, and I was new enough in my first district manager role that I was already spending most of my waking hours trying to prove I belonged in it. Two months of my working life were about to be organized around a concert, and I understood even then that this was a slightly ridiculous way to run a district. I did it anyway.
The part I couldn't do alone was the part that mattered. My side of the house was service — branch managers, tellers, everyone in front of clients all day. The sales side belonged to John.
John had at least twenty years on me, most of them in Los Angeles, most of them in exactly this kind of environment. He walked in the door smile first. Boisterous, a talker, the sort of person other people described as jovial without reaching for the word. He had a part-time job at Disneyland, which is its own kind of information about somebody.
He also could not win the tickets. There was nothing in this for him. No prize on his side, no metric that needed rescuing, no reason to spend two months pushing his people toward a number that belonged to me.
I had prepared a case. Something about client experience being everyone's responsibility, delivered in the voice of someone who had recently been given a district. I got about a sentence and a half in before he was asking what the target number was.
He did want to know, in some detail, which show.
What followed was two months of the strangest joint operation I've ever run. We never told anyone what I stood to win — it would have sounded absurd, and it was absurd, and neither of us wanted to explain it. So we told them the number instead. John took his sales people, I took the branch managers and tellers and everyone who answered a phone, and for eight weeks the entire district went above and beyond for a client survey score.
We hit the record. Sales went up too, which nobody had planned for and which John enjoyed enormously, on the grounds that it made the whole enterprise look intentional.
Here's what I noticed at the time and didn't have words for. He'd been leading people since I was in grade school, and there were a hundred small ways he could have run those two months as the senior partner doing a favor for the new guy. He didn't take any of them. He asked what I thought. He deferred when deferring made sense, in front of people, without making a performance of it. He asked my advice on his own things, and I don't think he was being generous — I think he actually wanted to know.
I was twenty-eight and being treated as an equal by someone two decades my senior. I remember thinking that this was how it was supposed to work. It is not, generally, how it works.
But none of that is really why I'm telling you about John, and I've only recently understood that those two months weren't the beginning of anything. They were downstream.
Not long after we met, that Disneyland job came up — he told me I should bring my partner any time we wanted. Then, without much of a pause, he told me a story about how Disney celebrated Pride.
I could not tell you a single detail of that story now. I remember thinking it was a cool thing to bring up, and I remember that he was the one who brought it up. That's what's left, all these years on.
He was white, straight, married with kids. Pride had no particular reason to be near the front of his mind on an ordinary weekday. But there it was, in the first weeks of knowing me, offered without being asked for.
I don't remember what I'd told him about myself by then, or in what order, or whether I'd said anything at all. What I remember is that I never had to manage myself around him. I never braced. Not once, in the whole time I knew him.
We were laid off the next year, in 2009, by which time we'd become real friends. Both of us out at once, both of us calling each other during those first strange weeks when you still get dressed like you have somewhere to be. My stakes were high. His were higher — two boys, both close enough to college that the worry had a start date.
We got through it, the way people do. Different cities eventually, different companies, different decades.
I hear from John a few times a year now — something he posts, something I post, a comment that means more than a comment usually does. Nearly twenty years since the two of us spent a fall chasing a client survey score so I could go see Celine Dion.
Here's the part he's never known. I talked about him at home. Not as a story with a point, just as the thing you say over dinner about your day — John did this, John said that, you'd like him. He was in my house for almost two years, in the ordinary way, and he had no idea. Whatever he thought he was doing at work, this is where it actually went.
I don't think it would occur to him even now that he was doing anything. He was just a guy who walked in smile first, who asked what I thought, who told a story about Disneyland in the first weeks of knowing me and never made me do the part I'd braced my whole life to do.
Somewhere out there is someone for whom you are John. You made a room easier to walk into and you have no memory of it, because the things that land hardest on other people are almost never the things we were trying to do.
I hope you find out one day. I hope somebody tells you.
Maybe today's the day you tell yours.
"The story your people tell when you're not in the room is your truest legacy." — MB
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