The Contented Cow Blog

Building Workplaces That Work

Twenty years ago, I had the honor of spending a two year stint as a preceptor at the FedEx Leadership Institute. The preceptor’s role was to design, develop, and deliver leadership and team training for the company’s management team. Together with GE and a few others, we were well out in front of the corporate university parade.

One of my first activities at the Institute was to attend, as a participant, the week long wilderness-based personal mastery and leadership program that I would subsequently be responsible for. As did most other program participants, I found the experience extremely impactful.

The program was held at a U.S. Forest Service camp about twenty miles north of Logan, Utah. As I recall, the program concluded on a Friday afternoon, and we were all bused to a hotel in Logan to await our flights the next day out of Salt Lake City.

As is often the case after a stressful, strenuous, successful effort, many in the group of staff and participants alike felt a need to unwind a bit. That evening, probably 3/4 of the combined group commandeered a conference room at the hotel, and did some serious alcohol-fueled unwinding. Aside from a few bottles that “fell” out of a window, nothing got broken, and no one did any serious misbehaving, but it was a good thing we didn’t have to walk very far.

Upon returning to work Monday, the half dozen or so members of the Institute staff who had spent the prior week in Utah were summoned to a meeting with Dr. Roy Yamahiro, head of OD for the company. Known for his quiet, deferential manner, Yamahiro launched unexpectedly into an angry and emotional tirade which quickly revealed that he had recent opportunity to speak with some of the city fathers of Logan, Utah, who were not the least bit impressed with our little gathering smack in the middle of a quiet, Mormon town.

When Roy came up for air at one point, one guy made the mistake of objecting, on grounds that he hadn’t attended the party. Yamahiro pointed out that since he had obviously known about the party, was likely the only one sober, and had done nothing to stop it, he found him in even greater contempt than the rest of us. It was as painful as those chats with your parents when they let you know how “disappointed” they are in you.

On our next trip to Logan, six alpha male managers who had been deemed some of the company’s best and brightest arrived a day early (on a weekend), paid a personal visit to one of the town fathers to apologize, then spent the day picking up trash in a park. It stung, but I will likely never forget the lesson about team members’ responsibility to, and for one another.

I was reminded of that lesson this week when I saw an article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette about a similar lesson being taught by Joe Paterno, Head Coach of the Penn State University football team.

It seems that a few months ago, several members of the team were involved in an off-campus fight. In an effort to teach the same lesson that Dr. Yamahiro taught us, and prevent further escapades, JoePa as he is affectionately known, has found something for the team (the whole team) to do on Sunday mornings following the Nittany Lions’ home games. They get to rise bright and early, don rubber gloves, and participate in the clean up of the 100,000 seat football stadium. My bet is the lesson will stick with those young men as well as Dr. Yamahiro’s did with me.

BTW, those looking for good leaders to borrow a lesson from could do a lot worse than observe the behavior of the 80 year old Paterno, who has coached Penn State for 41 years, won more Division 1-A games than anyone, and positively affected the character and careers of a lot of people.

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