Last week, we started an assessment of one of the larger office buildings in our portfolio. The very first step of the exercise was to figure out the proper points of contact for each of the multiple departments in the building. The maintenance team pinpointed some potential targets, but ultimately someone had to sit down and find out.
I spent half of Monday calling up and down the building, and then I burned up Tuesday morning blasting out email introductions between the departments and the architect. I joked with a colleague that I spent the first half of this week cold calling and spamming state employees. It was a glorified version of a high schooler’s first job search working their way down the yellow pages.
As the client, I could have forced the architect handle this task, but I wanted to send a signal that I respect them as professionals, reserving their labors for executing the actual data collection and analysis that they were really hired to do. This grunt work was a gray area in the contract, and I felt that pulling a power play so early in the relationship would ultimately cost the project in reduced quality in the final delivered assessment.
Maybe I was just played for a patsy by my own consultant, but I think true leadership is earned via service to those you are leading. Authority comes with my job title, but the true job is to motivate my team to deliver their best work, which is done the hard way.