It's About the Team

I was taught in my business classes in college all about assets, liabilities, balance sheet, revenue, expenses, profit margins, EBITDA, and the like. But it was in my sociology classes where I learned the most important lessons about leading a business unit. Most successful businesses have figured this out. They realize that their most important asset is their team.

Now this got a little complicated over the years. I put myself out there. I found myself really caring about my staff. I worried alongside of them when they had health scares. I consoled them when there were deaths in their families. I dealt with numerous divorces, celebrated births and helped people navigate through financial difficulties and bankruptcies. And I attended more funerals than I can list. It wasn’t easy.

The complications came in two areas: (1) I found that unless I was careful, I owned their problems also. I started to lose sleep worrying about someone’s marital issues or health matters and (2) I found that too often I was going in early or staying late to listen and counsel someone. I realized that my health sometimes was affected and that I was sometimes taking away time from my own family.

As I gained experience, I learned to build better boundaries and to not have this affect me personally as much. And since I am a man of faith, I started to learn to hand a lot of these issues over to God. He has much bigger shoulders than I do and so much of this was outside my span of control. I still cared but I let God handle the issues.

I now look back and see so many of my favorite employees (yes, you have your favorites) excelling as an employees, spouses and parents. I see folks that I took a risk on promoting them that are now regional leaders and Vice Presidents with significant responsibilities. I see younger staff now owning their own homes, sending their kids to college and having goals. And I see people continuing many of the same practices both professionally and personally we implemented when we worked together. Talk about being proud!

For every one employee that didn’t work out, there were a hundred that did. For every one person that abused these boundaries, there were too many to count that just needed someone to care. They needed someone to share their pain. For every employee that violated my trust or let me down, there were hundreds that simply needed to be inspired, provided hope or just needed to know someone cared.

One of my favorite African proverbs is that ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together’. They didn’t teach this in any of my business classes. Nor did any mentor focus on this. It’s just an important lesson most successful leaders figure out eventually. You cannot succeed on your own. You do not have all of the secret sauces, you don’t actually do all of the work and you are only as strong as your teammates.

As I reflect back on my career, I made a ton of mistakes. But I never made one when it came to risking it on caring about an employee or their family. I never erred on showing people that we cared. And it was absolutely always the right thing to do help give people a hand and hope.

If you are a younger leader, you do not have to ‘pretend’ to have all of the answers. You do not have to ‘fake it till you make it’. You do not have to worry about people thinking you are weak. On the contrary, care about your employees and show that you value them and they will move mountains for you.

Thanks for reading this.

With a goal to “help the next one in line”, Glen Cavallo, a 30+ year healthcare executive has chosen to share the many lessons he has learned with others. Glen does this by serving as a coach/advisor to leaders at all levels of organizations, as a board member and as he presents inspirational speeches at regional, national, annual and awards meetings.