It was a good time of year to be introduced to ‘How I Got Into College’, an edition of This American Life from September 2013. It tells the tale of a student – Emir Kamenica – and how a stolen library book got him into his dream school. Emir is a Bosnian refugee who is now the Richard O. Ryan Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
The narrator and interviewer is Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball (2003), The Big Short (2010) and The Undoing Project (2016). His introductory chapter in Liar’s Poker (1989) is among the most riveting piece of writing I have ever read. He is a marvellous teller of stories and this is no exception.
My interest was particularly taken by Emir’s memory of a single incident where a teacher took a personal interest in him. He tells how that moment changed his life and set him on the road to a doctorate from Harvard. The programme carries a surprise revelation that makes it a complex tale about belief, truth and memory.
When I read a quote attributed to Edmund Lee a few days later it seemed serendipitous. The end of the quote runs, ‘most of all surround yourself with those who see greatness within you even when you don’t see it yourself’. That does not mean people who show blind loyalty or supine agreement but those who care enough to challenge you and show you new ways of being.
The best leaders are able to see the ‘greatness’ within their colleagues. They recognise what people around them are capable of and have the personal courage and management skill to back their judgement. In doing this they usually give the individuals increased self-awareness and the confidence to more fully realise their potential.
Even in these self-revelatory days people are sometimes shy about telling the stories of how they were inspired, or which moments transformed their life. But these are tales worth recounting and sharing because they can help guide behaviour and are a good way of suggesting why looking for the potential in our friends and colleagues is a responsibility we should take seriously.
Without aspiring to compete with Emir’s extraordinary tale of struggle and achievement I recall my own pivotal moment at school with equal clarity (the irony of that statement will not be lost on those who have heard the programme). As a totally aimless and academically under-achieving 18-year-old I had decided to go to polytechnic to take a business studies course. In those pre-1992 days polytechnics in the UK were decidedly second-class to universities and my ‘choice’ was based upon having no better ideas for avoiding unemployment.
Shortly afterwards an unmistakeable New Zealand accent at full volume cut through the noise of several hundred children changing classes at my large comprehensive school in Essex. My English teacher had spotted me half-way down the stairs and had a point to make. ‘Alan Preece,’ she hollered. ‘You are not going to do business studies. You are going to be a journalist. See me later.’
Yvonne Cull, the English teacher, felt that young people needed to be treated like adults but required intervention, direction and unflinching honesty. Her classes were bracing sessions where the themes of power, manipulation, lust and love in Shakespeare were reinforced by making us interrogate our own teenage desires and passions. Lessons were often provocative and seldom comfortable, but she never stopped trying to help us understand that the stories were about the human condition and people just like us.
When she confronted me with the possibility of becoming a journalist she did not spare my blushes. She was candid about the need to overcome my lack of application, my mistaken belief that native wit was a substitute for research, and my tendency to continue defending positions long after they had been overrun by better arguments. But she filled me with a belief, based on her personal opinions, that I had the skills to do a job which involved enquiry, balancing opinions, and writing.
Mrs Cull went even further. She had researched the options and found a suitable course run by the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ). She made me sit in her home one evening to complete the application, she posted it, wrote a letter of recommendation and prepared me for the interview. Having secured a place, I failed my A-levels, but she pushed me to re-take them so I could join the course a year later.
Nowadays, I might consider this moment in my history as an example of radical candor – ‘the ability to challenge directly and show you care personally at the same time’. Kim Scott’s 2017 book on the subject is a good read and captures the subject well. As well as developing the theory it recounts a terrific example involving Sheryl Sandberg who was her boss at Google.
I didn’t go on to be the investigative journalist that Mrs Cull thought I could become. Armed with my NCTJ course award I secured a place in the press office of Tesco which became the stepping stone to public relations, marketing and eventually board level roles as COO and CEO. Throughout those years I was armed with the knowledge that, despite their own busy life, someone had thought well enough of me to share their belief in my potential.
There have, of course, been other ‘sliding door’ moments in my career when senior colleagues have made a firm intervention to show me a different way of being. Most of these occasions have been intensely personal, very direct and driven by their belief that I could do better and be more. For those leaders there was a role for training courses, theories and structure but there were also times when vivid, focused, personal engagement was their way of making a difference.