How I Created a Leadership System for the Real World – Part 2
In the first part of my story, “How I Created a Leadership System for the Real World – Part 1”, I discussed the challenges I faced as an adolescent and teenager and how one chance meeting with a stranger in South Carolina would spark a journey I would have never expected. Below is the remainder of that journey and how it has shaped my life and those that I have worked with through the leadership models I have developed…
That belief in my self-control would soon be tested with my dad’s diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in August of 1987, shortly before I was to begin my freshman year at Fordham University in the Bronx, NY.
Fordham was 300 miles away from Portland, Maine and I did not want to leave under these conditions. I told my father I wanted to delay school and he insisted that I was not going to put my life on hold for his. Instead, I travelled home almost every 3 weeks to see him..
While at school, I had never experienced such a deep sense of loneliness. Because of my focus on what was going on at home, I never got involved in any school activities. Prior to my dad’s diagnosis, my intention was to head to Fordham and try out for the football team. That option was not possible given the circumstances.
I remember eating lunch every day by myself while on campus. Yet, as painful as this time was, it provided me with an incredible opportunity to build resilience and gain a very deep understanding of who I was at my core. This experience was an opportunity to test the belief that I was in control of my destiny.
My dad would eventually pass away four months later on December 1st and I am grateful that I was able to be at the hospital with him when he died. Shortly after his funeral I returned to Fordham to take my final exams and then prepared to return home for Christmas break.
There are certain experiences or moments in time that we never forget. For me, one of those moments was waiting at the Fordham stop for the Metro North train to start my journey back to Maine and realizing as the train approached that
I would be returning home as an orphan for Christmas.
While the loss of my parents a little more than a year apart was devastating, I believe if I had not met that man in South Carolina, I would not have been prepared to deal with that magnitude of loss. This is not to diminish the importance of my own siblings in supporting me as well. Because through that experience, my understanding of the importance of family and the power of belonging would also shape who I would become and the work I would be called to do. Without them, I would not be where I am.
While I wish I could say that my quest for personal development continued on a positive trajectory during the remainder of college, it didn’t.
I regularly vacillated between my drive to become a better person and my decision to self-sabotage my growth through excessive drinking and other poor choices. During my summers in college, I worked as a bouncer at a popular bar in Portland called Cadillac Jack’s. While I did not look for fights, I was always prepared to get in one. It provided me a position of significance when I did not feel significant.
Looking back on that experience has helped me today because I recognize that the aggression that others exhibit toward their co-workers and others oftentimes is a sign of their own insecurities and unhappiness with themselves. I’ve been there!
What allowed me to not completely self-destruct during the remainder of college was that my internal compass was strong enough to get me back on course before my poor decisions sent me too far in the wrong direction. In all honesty, there were certainly some close calls.
Intellectually, I knew the direction I needed to go but it would be my behaviors that determined my success or failure.
After graduating from college, I got a job as a sales representative for Automatic Data Processing. It was my first experience in sales, and I loved the autonomy and possibilities it provided based on my efforts. It was a profession in which my drive and personality thrived.
Not long after that I married the girl I had dated on and off throughout college and at 29 we had our first child named Joshua on October 28th. The birth of Josh had rekindled a joy that I had suppressed in my life for almost a decade; the celebration of Christmas.
As a result of my dad passing away in December, the sound of Christmas music brought up immense feelings of loss because Christmas was a holiday that I always enjoyed sharing with all of my family. That first Christmas with Josh,
I was finally able experience the wonderful sounds and experiences of Christmas again through a new life.
Just as I thought my life could not experience a deeper joy from the creation of this family unit, I would soon experience a new loss that in many ways was more painful than the loss of my parents. In less than ten months from Josh’s birth, his mother informed me that she was not happy in our marriage and would be leaving me.
There is a saying you often hear around investing that says, “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”, well as it related to my marriage and my son, I did not even own another basket.
The next several months for me were filled with an enormous sense of grief and loss. As I have looked back on this experience, I believe, once again, that my parents and God were watching over me. Instead of a man from South Carolina, it was a child that would help guide me. My focus and responsibility on raising Josh allowed me to grow immensely as a father and as a future husband.
While I initially wanted to blame my ex-wife for leaving me and her son, I knew that this would not make things better. Again, I had an opportunity to test what I had first discovered with Zig Ziglar, my own decisions would determine my destiny, no one else. After resisting the initial desire to want to blame her for our circumstances, I began to look at what I could have done differently.
I decided that if I wanted my next relationship to last, I must focus on what I needed to change in my behaviors first. That approach paid off.
A little over a year after I met my wife Cyndi and we had two more children named Grace and Noah. Today, Cyndi and my children are at the center of everything that I do. They have been my greatest gift.
Just as my personal life had experienced great challenges and opportunities for growth, my professional life had experienced many opportunities to develop as well. The most significant came after the divorce of my first wife. Prior to my divorce, I was entering my third year in commercial real estate and while I enjoyed this profession, I realized it was not conducive to raising a ten-month old.
At this point I made the decision to enter that pharmaceutical industry as a sales representative. While never one to enjoy science growing up, I loved the opportunity to learn continuously. It was a wonderful profession that provided my first opportunities to experience my hand at training others and becoming involved in leadership development.
I was supported in my desire to learn more about leadership and completed my master’s in organizational leadership.
While I loved the opportunities that were available, I also became disenchanted with many of the poor leadership behaviors that were being modeled around me.
Drawing on my first experiences with Zig Ziglar, I believed I was destined to create a better leadership model to help individuals, teams and organizations maximize their potential. This would become the C.A.B.L.E.S Leadership System
When I entered the pharmaceutical industry, there was a great deal of emphasis on continually using available research to improve a representative’s knowledge of the disease states and treatments they represented. By doing so, they became more valuable partners with their providers and were more effective at gaining their trust.
During this time I also began to immerse myself in the research around leadership and focused on a select set of behaviors that seemed to have the greatest impact on leadership effectiveness. This was the beginning of the CABLES Leadership Model.
Just as researchers in our company were searching for effective treatments for specific diseases, I was searching for the evidence that would help me identify the most effective approach to developing leaders. To further this growth, I enrolled at Quinnipiac University to pursue my masters in Organizational Leadership.
I was now on a relentless pursuit to identify and validate the behaviors that would help leaders be most effective: professionally and personally.
CABLES was an acronym that represented the six leadership behaviors I had identified as having the greatest impact on the success of individuals, teams and organizations. They included, Congruence, Appreciation, Belongingness, Listening, Empathy and Specifics.
This model was a cross between a swiss army knife and an owner’s manual. Similar to the Swiss Army knife it had an endless number of applications based on such a small set of behaviors. As well, it could be used to identify the root cause of a disagreement and provide the behavior necessary for resolving the conflict.
I was confident that I had identified a better approach for developing leadership behaviors. Unfortunately, up until this point I was unable to gain the interest of anyone that had the authority to promote this new model. I seemed to be surrounded by leaders who agreed on CABLES intellectually but were unwilling to act on CABLES behaviorally.
Looking back, I am convinced that the positive relationships I built with my physicians and staff was the result of my ability to demonstrate many of the behaviors that are today part of CABLES.
As luck would have it, I was assigned an interim manager who took a great interest and a strong belief in the model I had created. Without her knowing it she was displaying many of the behaviors that I had outlined in CABLES.
Looking back at our time together, I witnessed her demonstration of CONGRUENCE and the trust it developed on our team. Her actions always seemed to be in alignment with the companies stated mission and values.
She regularly demonstrated APPRECIATION for the individual contributions of her team and was consistent in her treatment of those on her team. If she had favorites, she did not let them impact her ability to treat those on her team equally.
BELONGINGNESS was something that she instilled on our team.
While there were a variety of personalities, this manager’s approach was inclusive of everyone on her team. I have often believed that Listening is a super-power for those that have been able to do it authentically.
My manager was one of those individuals that demonstrated a sincere interest in what you were saying through her skill of LISTENING.
Next she demonstrated a great deal of EMPATHY for the challenges that those on her team faced as a result of an increasingly distrustful relationship between the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry. She understood the access challenges this placed on her team and did not place unrealistic expectations on how we would address these challenges.
Lastly, she modeled SPECIFICS. This was the behavior of setting clear expectations and intense ownership of those expectations for all involved. On her team, all knew what was expected and how they would be held accountable.
They say history doesn’t repeat but it certainly rhymes. Unexpectedly, the manager that had been such an advocate for my passionate pursuit of a more effective approach to effective leadership was now going to be taking on a new role in a different part of the company.
Soon, I would report to a new manager who had his own motivations and behaviors that were not in alignment with mine.
This new manager was much different than my previous manager in behavior and reputation, which did not mix well with my experience, research and beliefs on how to lead effectively. As a result, I was not the most compliant employee. My resistance to his direction and behaviors set me on a path of performance management plans that were self-induced.
In a period of less than a year, all of the ambition and vision I had for contributing to the growth of this organization’s leadership development efforts were quickly slipping away.
Yet, my enthusiasm for the CABLES model that I had created provided me the drive to push one last time. As a part of a leadership program my previous manager had selected me to participate in, I took the opportunity to meet with one of the directors. We discussed my model and while he was enthusiastic about it’s potential, he cautioned me about the likliehood of anyone listening.
He secretly told me that the department that was in charge of developing better teams and leaders in the company was one where individuals would not support new ideas if it challenged their initiatives. I felt the final lifeline slip away.
Here I was, once again, in a place of enormous growth but unhappy with my current circumstances. What really was my path moving forward in life?
It has been said that to motivate young eagles to leave the nest and fly, the mother eagle will often make the nest so uncomfortable that the birds are motivated to leave. In hindsight, this is what I believe needed to happen to me.
The comfortable thing to do was to use my knowledge, passion and drive in the safe environment of that one organization. Yet, the impact I wanted to make globally would require me to go out on my own and create Emery Leadership Group. Emery was my dad’s middle name. In my mind he was a true leader without the title.
In this speech I explain how a Global Positioning System (GPS), a piece of antique furniture, and a smoke detector can change your life.
The GPS presents the opportunity we all have in our lives to act like a GPS and “recalculate” when we are faced with a challenge or poor decision. There is a way to get where we are going if we simply recalculate.
Next, is the example of antique furniture. For those that are collectors, they know that the value is in the naturally aging of a piece, which is often called patina. Yet, when people try to remove this patina, they often times reduce the value of the piece. The struggles and challenges we face in our lives provide similar value and when we ignore them or worse, try and hide them, we reduce our value.
Lastly, I speak about a smoke detector as it relates to the primitive part of our brain which was designed to protect us when a threat was perceived. While a smoke detector in our house is meant to protect us from getting caught in a fire, we have enough sense to know that we don’t need to evacuate the house or call 911 if the smoke detector goes off because of a non-emergency.
Unfortunately, the primitive part of our brain does not know how to decipher a real from a perceived threat and unless we override it, it will take over. Taking risks is an example where your primitive brain may try to talk you out of doing something that is outside of your comfort zone because it perceives it as a threat. This is where we need to override the system and tell ourselves that this is not a real threat. That is where the growth takes place.
As I illustrated above, the obstacles I encountered and The CABLES model that I developed, have provided the greatest growth for me as an individual, a spouse, a father, a leader, and a member of my community.[MR2]
Today, my ability to connect with executives in the C-Suite and employees on the front line is a direct result of the experiences I have had throughout my life.
The drive to be a better man, a better manager, a better dad and husband all came from those formative experiences of failing and then finding a better way to get what I wanted in life, and that’s what I have built for the individuals, teams, and organizations that I am entrusted to partner with.
I believe that I have created the most workable blueprint for personal, professional and organizational success that I’ve ever seen in action. That’s exactly what CABLES is. It’s a blueprint that anyone can apply whenever they need to resolve conflict, find consensus or create a common bond and mission among team members.
Many who have implemented CABLES have written testimonials describing the powerful impact that identifying and modeling these behaviors has had on them personally and professionally.
As a result of my ability to speak with candor and compassion
when working with my clients, I have consistently been able to
forge a high level of trust and create an accelerated level of effective progress.
The CABLES Leadership Model is one that I have adopted in my own life as well. As I have reflected over the successes and failures in both my personal and professional life, I have referred to the CABLES blueprint as the tool to diagnose and problem solve as well as the tool to promote vibrant organizational and individual success. It is my internal compass.
The CABLES Leadership Model has reimagined what it means to lead and has proven that there is a better way. And I am ready now to share that with you.
The CABLES system is freely available for you and you can intellectually learn it in about an hour but without continuous application and support, it is useless. Like any other system, there are important nuances and subtle tuning that must be done for full effectiveness.
The best way to experience it is with a personal demonstration. Read it over, see if it resonates with you, then apply it just once with a family member or associate. I am confident you will experience a benefit.
When the complete CABLES System is modeled, you can expect to see a deeper, more inclusive team culture, higher productivity and ultimately generating more profit due to simply getting more of the right things done along with more goals accomplished.
If you would like a graphic of the CABLES Blueprint or would like to discuss further, you can email me at Patrick.
You can also listen to my podcast, Learning from Leaders, to gain more insight into how I help organizations and individuals to rise above their best.
I welcome your inquiry and the beginning of a meaningful conversation about your success, the success of your team and the value this brings to all your stake holders.
Emery Leadership Lessons 