Performance is the Price of Freedom

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Posted by Dan Caruso
May 21, 2008

Great Feedback from a Wayward Baseball Fan

A friend of mine and former (& hopefully future) co-worker is a St. Louis Cardinals fan. Though this is more forgivable than if he pined for the Chicago White Sox, it is still quite annoying to us Cubs’ fans. Anyway, I received an email from this wayward baseball fan. He was kind enough to offer me constructive feedback on this morning’s blog post. His taste in baseball teams is questionable, but his message was spot on.

I’ll refer to this guy as John as it is a generic enough name. To protect his identity, I will change his last name to Idaho. So I’ll call him John Idaho. Wait, that sounds made up. Let’s see. How about John Montana. Yes, that is much better. So, without further adieu, here is John Montana’s feedback:

While I completely understand your position and why you wrote [it], it can come off to folks as you always thinking ‘if I am working with you there are better uses of my time’ to the employee. This may be intended in many cases but I imagine there are instances where it is in your best interest to spend ongoing time to continue to groom and shape folks as part of their particular career maturation and growth, correct? I guess what I am saying is there may be very purposeful times where you are choosing to work with someone in a positive sense and if they read that bolded sentence they may feel a bit of angst or even resentment knowing that you are only spending time with them because you feel you have to and that you may be quietly thinking ‘I have better things to spend my time on.’

The passage John is referencing is: “So, for all of you involved with me on a professional basis, you heard it here first. If I am deeply involved in how you are doing your job, know I am doing so because I feel it is necessary. Know also that I feel it is a sub-optimal way for me to spend my time. If you complain about my micro-management, you will now hear me utter ‘performance is the price of freedom’. ”

John, thanks for bringing this to my attention. My words are horrible. The context of the blog post was situations when I am being perceived to micro-manage employees. It is where I am being overly involved with suggesting to a person how they should go about doing their job. Fortunately, I am not often in this situation today.

Telecom and business are my passions. I love collaborating with employees/team members on all sorts of business topics. I learn from them–like when Mark Minor took us through what he is doing on Google Maps. I bounce ideas off of them. This is why I do what I do.

I know the mysterious John Montana knows this and again I thank him for bringing my attention to this wording.

So Now What?

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Posted by Dan Caruso
May 21, 2008

Performance is the Price of Freedom

NOTE: Please read the subsequent blog post “Great Feedback from a Wayward Baseball Fan“ . Some of the wording below was poor and might have left a wrong impression–instead of changing it, I decided to respond to the feedback from a misguided baseball fan.

Wow. This is a quote that stuck with me. Perhaps it is commonly used. For me, I heard it only once but I jotted it down immediately, knowing I could use it in the blog as well as to terrorize employees.

Zayo has been in the news a bunch as of late. A price of this publicity for me is that I receive an over-whelming number of requests to network. Though flattering, these phone calls, coffees, lunches, and subsequent email follow-ups chew up lots of time.

Anyway, I agreed to meet a person–I’ll call him Wyatt as I watched the movie Tombstone last night–for breakfast. Wyatt took me through his career experiences, which included close relationships with two specific mentors. Evidently, these mentors were hard driving type-As. They pushed their people hard and demanded a lot from them. Many people complained at being micro-managed.

Wyatt emphasized that he had a positive experience with these two mentors. Both, he explained, had the philosophy “Performance is the Price of Freedom”. That is, once they developed confidence in someone’s ability to deliver good results, these execs would give their top performers plenty of space and autonomy.

Well said. I’ve had lot’s of people complain about me over the years–and usually it was that I was being too demanding of them. Where do you think the nickname “Bear” came from? Today, I am often asked how I am able to be involved with several ventures. The answer, in my opinion, is that I work hard to create situations where talented people can perform without requiring my day-to-day involvement.

So, for all of you involved with me on a professional basis, you heard it here first. If I am deeply involved in how you are doing your job, know I am doing so because I feel it is necessary. Know also that I feel it is a sub-optimal way for me to spend my time. If you complain about my micro-management, you will now hear me utter “performance is the price of freedom”.

For those of you who operate autonomously, know that you are earning it through performance. Either that, or your autonomy is because I am distracted with my blog.