What is your job?

I was appointed to my first management job at 22 years of age. According to the recent findings on brain maturation, at that age I barely had sufficient judgment to come in out of the rain, much less manage a portfolio of prescription drugs for a major pharma company. I was my boss’s first hire, his first true subordinate. Despite his youth and inexperience he taught me the most valuable lesson in management I have ever learned – and he did this on my first day.

My phone rang early in the morning with a query from a hospital. They had run out of a chemotherapy drug, there was none available in the hospital wholesaler and they had a leukaemic 9-year-old girl arriving the next day to commence treatment. I promised to sort this out and call them back.

So I phoned our warehouse – no stock. Gulp. When was it due in? Ten days. Gulpety-gulp. I called two other hospitals to see if they had any stock on shelf that we could ‘borrow back.’ Nope, not a one. Feeling that I had run out of options, I walked into my boss’s office and uttered the immortal words, “Boss, we have a problem.” My boss was writing in his Filofax [yes, I know, but this was a loong time ago] and didn’t even look up. He held up his palm to stop me from interrupting his train of thought and when he did look up, it was to wave me out of his office. “Don't come in here with problems.”

And there was I thinking that I was doing so well! I had exhausted every avenue I could think of and this was a matter of life or death – literally! I sputtered a bit about a little girl with cancer as I backed out of his office, but he kept waving me away. So I made a cup of tea and sat down to think. Then I strode down to the warehouse, introduced myself to the person there with the most grey hair and asked her if similar problems had arisen in the past and what had been done in those cases. Next, I found my boss’s P.A. (also a few grey hairs) and talked to her.

Between the three of us, we came up with a half-arsed solution which involved me freezing my buns off on the tarmac of Dublin airport at 5.30 am the next day, waiting for a special delivery of cherry-red chemotherapeutic poison. When I went back into my boss’s office to propose this, he put his pen down, listened to me, nodded and sent me on my way. As I left his office, he asked, “Did we learn anything today?”

What is your job? I don’t care if you are the chairman or the doorman, I don’t care what your job description says – your job is to alleviate your boss’s headaches. Your job is to not run into his or her office shouting, “The sky is falling down,” even if the sky is falling down. Especially if the sky is falling down.

Your job is to clearly identify the difficulty, get input from any relevant sources, come up with some alternatives, make a recommendation and go into your boss’s office looking for permission, not solutions.

I am fascinated to see how many bright, highly-educated, highly trained 30-something, 40-something and 50-something employees don’t do this. I am even more fascinated at the number of supposedly capable, strategic, visionary bosses who do not demand this from their subordinates.

Did we learn anything today?