Character Goes Both Ways
So there I was...
Chugging a 48oz big gulp. Worst thing possible for dehydration, but I was unprepared for the 117°F Woodland Hills heat that afternoon. Normally I would be in my office, but my favorite and hardest working employee had recently suffered a seizure and his driver's license was revoked by the DMV. Since he could not drive to my client sites to aerate their expansive lawns (or anything else I needed him to drive to), the logical option would be to let him go.
Here's the thing about Chris, on his first day working for me he thoroughly detailed the work truck I gave him. It looked brand new afterwards. Then, on his own dime, he tinted the windows a few days later. There was no one that worked for me that ever took that kind of initiative. He took pride in everything he did and went the extra mile at every opportunity. There was no way on God's green earth I was going to lose him, so I made the decision that we would be a work team until he got medical clearance and could drive again. It would be a few months and it was July.
Chris and I began our day at 6:00am, loading two Ryan Lawnaire IV 19" core aerators into the back of the F-350. They weigh almost 300lbs each with the weights added, so running them up and down a wood plank is not for the faint of heart. If you haven't experienced aerating a lawn (let alone many), it is a full body workout unlike any other. We had some jugs of water, sandwiches, and salty snacks, so we thought we were well set for a hard day.
My Malibu clients were easy thanks to the residual June gloom marine layer hugging the homes along the beaches and at the bases of the canyons, keeping us cool and protected. It was the drive up Mulholland past Skirball Center when we were hit with the ridiculous wave of heat that was cooking the San Fernando valley. We got to the last property as the temperature peaked, and it was something I never experienced even at ASU.
I think back on that day now and I can still feel my clothes completely soaked through with sweat, and vividly remember the drive down the hill to 7 Eleven to load up on as much liquid and sugar as humanly possible. We would have more days like this, but thankful not as hot. And I think about the camaraderie Chris and I shared, the years of loyalty I gained from him, and the path I set him on and his own eventual success. And none of it would have happened if I had let him go. Character goes both ways.
I don't start my days looking for a leadership lesson. Sometimes it is just shade and electrolytes. But I read a piece in Forbes this week by a university president named Kent Ingle, on why integrity is the one leadership trait that cannot be coded, outsourced, or automated, and I sat there thinking, amen brother. His argument is that a machine can calculate the most cost-effective path forward in an instant, and it takes a leader with integrity to decide whether that path is one you can live with. I know when and where that sentence stops being theoretical. 117°F in Woodland Hills.
I know exactly what the machine would have done with Chris. Feed the situation to any optimizer worth its salt. Star employee, core job function is driving to client sites, license revoked by the DMV, duration unknown. The math is not hard, and it is not close. Terminate. Backfill. Move on. It is the correct answer to the question a beancounter's spreadsheet is allowed to ask, and it is completely, expensively wrong. The optimizer cannot see the young man who detailed a work truck until it looked new on his first day, and then tinted the windows a few days later on his own dime. That does not go in a cell. Initiative like that has no column.
This is the thing I keep coming back to about integrity, and it is the part Ingle is right about. It is not that integrity is the enemy of efficiency. It is that integrity runs on a longer clock than the machine is permitted to read. The cost of keeping Chris was real and it was immediate: it was my back on a wood plank behind a 300 pound aerator, my office empty for months, my own body cooking in the Valley. The return was invisible on the day I decided. Years of loyalty. A man who would run through a wall for me. A life that got set on a path. None of that was in the July numbers. All of it was real.
And that is what I meant by character going both ways, because this was not charity. Chris earned it. He had shown me exactly who he was every single day before the seizure ever happened, in a hundred small unpriced acts, and when his moment came I simply paid back what he had already banked. That is the transaction no algorithm can run, because it does not hit the books in the same quarter it is entered. Ingle has a line I wish I had written but I will echo it: trust is not built by being flawless, it is built by being real. There is nothing more real than a boss soaked through to his socks, handing you liquid sugar at the bottom of a canyon, because he decided you were worth keeping.
The empty chair in that decision, the one I have built a whole book around, was not Chris the liability standing in front of me in July. It was Chris the man he was going to become, who had no way to speak up for himself yet, because he did not exist yet. The optimizer only ever meets the present-tense version of a person, the one with the revoked license and the productivity gap. Integrity is the discipline of seating the future person at the table and letting him vote. The machine will never do that, because to the machine that chair is always empty.
So as we hand more and more of these calls to systems that compute the cost-effective path in a blink, here is my question this morning, from a man who once chose the 117° path on purpose.
When the efficient answer and the right answer part ways, and they will, who at your company is still willing to sweat for the difference?
Because the machine already knows what it would do. It would let Chris go.
Source: Leading In The Age Of AI: Why Integrity Matters More Than Ever, Kent Ingle, Forbes
#AI #Leadership #Integrity #Character #Ethics #TheEmptyChair #STIW