I am on my way to Saint Louis MO to attend The Gathering of Games Conference. I caught a connecting flight at Dulles airport and now sit in a very small seat on a regional jet next to a very nice young women (she got the short straw 
If I am going to sit this close to someone I have to make some conversation. Before take off, I began by asking her a few questions. She told me she is a graphic artist and works with the government. She had been meeting with her team over the past two days trying to resolve a problem. On day one she thought they made good progress. They identified the problem and came up with a good solution. On day two she felt frustrated because they handed the problem over to another department. She wondered how they could be sure the work was going to be done correctly? “Why couldn’t we just complete the work ourselves?” she asked. My thoughts jumped to my own style of leadership, I like to help create the solution but the details of implementation, although critical, I would prefer to give away once a strategy is created. I can do the little picture, but I play best in the big picture arena. She however, thought differently, and I respect her sense of responsibility. It was not until later in the conversation that I started to understood why she felt so strongly about accountability.
She asked me where I was going and I explained the conference is about financial transparency. The founder, Jack Stack wrote a book called, The Great Game of Business, and he has had a successful following over the years. The business concepts that Jack promotes help to build trust and understanding among team members. I plan on interviewing Jack during the event – more on that later. I then tried to give her the short version of the Trust Tour: I’m on a 1000 day journey focusing on trust; it’s the most important subject in the world; I am blogging about it everyday etc…
At the end of my description of the Trust Tour, she surprised me by offering her father as a interviewee. “He breaks every rule in the book”, she said. At first I was not sure if she was kidding or not. She went on to explain that her father was a small business owner and had made money by stretching the truth. He makes empty promise to his employees, vendors and customers and profits from it. Wow, that was a bold statement about a family member. She said, “I have not talked to him since I was 15. He made empty promises to me too. I never got the horse…” “What does that mean,” I asked? She went on to say that he had moved her family from St Louis across the border into Illinois at a time when she was young did not want to go. He promised her she could have a horse when they got to the new home. “I never got the horse,” she said again. There was also a promise of a dog too, not just any dog, you know the small cute little pudgy kind called a Pug. “We never got the dog either,” she said. Instead, he bought home a Chinese Shar Pei, a vicious little fighting dog. Just recently she finally got the Pug for her own family.
When she was growing up, she said that her father demanded the truth from her. “Did you do the dishes?” and he would threaten her with harsh punishment for lying. He however, did not hold himself to the same standard. In her view, when he talked, it was like he was just moving his mouth… nothing he said could be believed. For example, right now her brother is working for her dad for pennies with the promise that someday, son … this will all be yours. She thinks that will never happen.
Her mom was very different and helped her establish the kind of values she has today. When I asked her why her Dad had gone to the dark side, she thought a little, then suggested that it might be linked to the fact his father died when he was 8 and his mother really never paid much attention to him. He was never brought up in a values based culture. She said the upside in her life was that as a result of his poor choices she became responsible.
Soon she brought the conversation full circle and began to relate her feelings of not wanting to let go of the project today and how responsible she felt to get the job done. What if that other team did not follow through? One more broken promise…. “It’s not going to happen on my watch she says.”
Let’s make sure we are not the ones responsible for the horse that never comes. If we are, let’s fix it… after all you’re on the Trust Tour. Pass it on.
