Richard Lee - The Manager User Manual
Ever wonder how a "design tyrant" transforms into an empathetic leader? Richard Lee takes us on his compelling journey, sharing how he evolved from a manager who ruled with an iron fist to one who leads with patience and understanding. This episode is a reminder that personal growth and learning are a lifelong pursuit.
Links and Resources from the Episode:
Click here to go to the Neuro-osity website
Click here for Dr. Megan Anna Neff's Divergent Conversations podcast
Click here for the Divergent Insights blog from Dr. Megan Anna Neff
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The Bosshole® Chronicles
"Richard Lee - The Manager User Manual”
Original Publish Date: 7/16/2024
Host: John Broer
John Broer: A very warm welcome to all of our friends out there in the Bosshole Transformation Nation. This is your host, John Broer, welcoming you back to another installment of the Bosshole Chronicles, and today we have a guest that I met years ago. He and I met under different circumstances, different organizations, but reconnected within the last year and his story, his journey, it taken some unexpected turns that absolutely influenced how he shows up in the workplace and as a manager, and I think it's very powerful and it also connects to some other episodes of ours and you'll get that as we go through it. But I'd like you to meet Richard Lee. Richard's a great guy and I appreciate what he is sharing with the Bosshole Transformation Nation. So let's jump in.
The Bosshole Chronicles are brought to you by Real Good Ventures, a talent optimization firm, helping organizations diagnose their most critical people and execution issues with world-class analytics. Make sure to check out all the resources in the show notes and be sure to follow us and share your feedback. Enjoy today's episode, Richard, it is so good to have you here on the Bosshole Chronicles. Welcome.
Richard Lee: Thank you, John, it is good to be here.
JB: I let everybody know in the introduction that you and I met a few years back under different circumstances. You were with a different organization and there was a period of time where we just sort of lost touch. There were things going on which is really going to be relevant to this story and you're sharing it with the Bosshole Transformation Nation. But I'd like to go back because when we did reconnect I realized that you had experienced some really transformational things in your life that influenced not only who you are but also how you show up as a manager at work. But I want to go back. I think it's helpful to provide some context. So would you mind just let's jump in the Wayback Machine. You and I may understand that reference. Some of our audience may not, but let's go back and tell us about the previous work experience. And you admitted you said you were right in the middle of the boss hole zone. So tell us a little bit more about that.
RL: Sure, I've been around a bit. I think we have somewhat similar tenures in the workplace, but many years ago I was at an organization in providing automotive B2B let's call it that and being the most senior designer on staff. When we grew to a point where we needed management, they just made me the design manager.
I like to refer to that period of my career as me being a design tyrant, because I thought that being manager of designers meant that I just had to make all the decisions and my way or a highway in regards to anything going on. I mean, I did a lot of regards to anything going on right. I mean I did a lot of excellent work there as well, but I was definitely in the Bosshole Zone. I had no preparation, no interpersonal training, no leadership training, and oftentimes, as you're aware, organizations don't provide any sort of infrastructure or training for their leaders. They make the mistake of assuming that if someone has a subject matter expertise, has a lot of expertise in an area, then they'll just be able to be a manager of people doing that type of work.
JB: Yeah, it kind of happens by osmosis, right yeah?
RL: That's obviously not true. Some people are natural born leaders and some have to grow into it. So yeah, I learned over time, being in a couple of other management roles later in my career, what a noob I was and how little I knew about modern management practices.
JB: Okay, fair enough.
RL: And being a good leader, right. I got better. So the second and third time were, let's call it, medium and hot porridge. The third time was the charm and both my own analysis of my performance there. It aligned with my employees' performance and my management assessment, et cetera. So everyone felt like I was doing a good job the third time around, whereas the first time around, only in my own head was I doing a good job.
JB: Right, oh, that's, that's so. You know what? That is a very common story. It's one of you know, take a great individual contributor, subject matter expert, throw them and just magically they're going to train and develop other people. Of course, that doesn't happen. However, it is a very common practice. It's a bad practice and that's why we talk about reinventing the workplace, reinventing the manager and, like you said, after a few iterations you realize, oh my gosh, okay, I know I wanted to do this, but did you ever want to go back to your first team and like apologize, just going, I just like, I hope you know I didn't know what I was doing and so please don't take that personally. But you know, we've had stories here where the people that are on the receiving end of that there's some really horrible stories, some devastating stories. Would you say you're a design tyrant? Was that what it?
RL: Okay, fair enough.
JB: That's a new one. I love it. So thank you for that and thank you for giving us some perspective and the fact that you had learned from these. Then you experienced something. You experienced a layoff, you found yourself, I think you said, on sabbatical, but you found yourself without work. And then you had some really major things happen that have shaped who you are today. So can we look at that period as well, yeah, absolutely so.
RL: The last organization that I worked in really enjoyed my time there and I really enjoyed the domain which was really human resources and managing and assisting and enabling people in the workforce. During that period of time, right as I joined that organization, I was officially I got my ADHD diagnosis. Okay, and so that was impactful for me because over, let's say, from 40 on, my ability to read multiple books at the same time and keep my place in all of them and understand what was going on it began to diminish. So, let's say, I was keeping four or five books in play at a time, no problems at all.
Year after year, let's knock a book off, and knock a book off to the point where I was having trouble finishing a single book at a time. This is not normal, this is not good. At the same time, problems with organizing things at work, keeping track of what's going on with my kids, you know, pickup times, drop off times, et cetera. Lots of details, keeping lots of balls in the air became more and more challenging and thankfully, through social media and just discussions with other folks, I came to the conclusion hey, maybe I need to look into this ADHD thing.
Maybe, that explains what's going on here. And, sure enough, I didn't just have the inattentive type, which is what I thought, but I had the hyperactive type, because it turns out, if you're tapping your foot in your head, that's also hyperactive disorder, right?
So if you're if you're uh, your gears are always spinning, you're always thinking eight steps ahead and you've already got things prepped in your mind to speak when that person finishes talking. Finally, all those are indicators, right. So, yeah, ADHD, okay, that makes sense, that makes a lot of sense, and getting treated for that was itself life changing. Suddenly, I'm restored back to being able to keep all the ducks in a row, right really okay that's a huge blessing.
JB: What does that look like?
RL: Yeah, yeah, basically you. You tend to speak to a primary physician first maybe your your regular family doctor and they'll say well, I don't want to treat this, but I would like to send you to a specialist, right. So you go see a psychiatrist, definitely. Do your comparison shopping, find a good one, right. But then you just have an evaluation, find out what the best way to handle ADHD is If you're diagnosed. Some people do it through medication, others through process change, habit forming, things like that. But ideally you come out the other end much more able to deal with your life.
JB: That is so fascinating and very interesting from the standpoint that our listeners will remember it was just a few months ago. We had Nancy Disbro on here and Nancy is the founder of a company called Neuroocity. So if you go into the show notes you will see Nancy's information. And what's interesting, Richard, is that she, as well as you, it was later in life that she was diagnosed as somebody that had really neurodiversity, I mean a neurodiversity need, and I understand from you that isn't necessarily easy because I think the natural focus is on for children or younger people. Is that correct?
RL: That is absolutely true and it's something that we might like to think oh, that was back in the old days. It's currently that way, at least in the US and I believe in the U.K. as well. It is really difficult to find a health care provider that is both willing and able. In other words, they have the the knowledge, the capacity and the willingness to diagnose adults for things like autism spectrum disorder. Okay, and because typically, yeah, that in the past, even as early as the 20s and 30s and 40s earlier, it was known as Asperger's right, one of the names that was applied, and that's a good example of how culturally we curated who we thought could have this malady, who could possibly have this condition.
Certainly, it's only going to be boys. Girls don't get this. It's only going to be white boys, and it's only going to be white boys between zero and three, right, okay, well, that's not clinically accurate at all in any dimension. Exactly, just like women experience heart attacks different than men, the feelings that they get, the warning signs, the sensations, well, so do cognitive issues. They manifest differently across gender and across cultural divides. So really it's important to find a provider that is aware of all those complexities and that can be difficult in this time. I myself had a 14-month waiting period and had to pay quite a bit of money, not covered by insurance, in order to have the privilege of getting a diagnosis session set up.
JB: Okay, so this is an aspect of just for public knowledge that really is still undeveloped. Is that a fair assessment? It's still a growth field.
RL: Let's be kind about that. People are learning about this themselves a lot of times through social media. They're seeing the lived experiences of others being shared and they're resonating with that. They're like, "That's been my experience too. I thought it was the only one, or I thought that was normal. Oh, that's not how everyone experiences life, so there's been a lot of that. That has resulted in some sentiments kind of rolling out in terms of well, now, these days, everybody has ADHD, everybody's autistic these days. No, but the worldwide community as a whole is becoming more aware, right, right, raising our hands and saying, yeah, that's me.
JB: Well, okay, so let's talk about that, because Nancy had shared with us and she has certainly done her homework. I would imagine you could verify this. She says presently, 10% of the workforce in the United States has some level of neurodiversity, right, ADHD on the, you know the autism spectrum. I mean 10%, and what that says to me is, as we talk about equipping managers and supervisors, they need to be aware of this, because if they're not aware of it, I mean I'll give you an example. We have a family friend. He's an adult, he works, he has a full-time job and he's on the spectrum and when you speak to him, everything is very literal. I mean, if you were to walk up and say, yeah, you know, Monday, right, you know. Or it's raining, cats and dogs, I mean you know what I'm talking about in terms of it.
RL: It is literal.
JB: It's like no, it's not, it's. It's. It's rain coming down from the sky, it's not cats and dogs. If somebody doesn't know that, if there's a manager, supervisor, colleague that is not aware or familiar with this, you could see where things get very confusing and even create some tension between people because of a lack of knowledge. But 10% is not an insignificant number.
RL: No, and I suspect due to the nature of these issues being on a spectrum themselves, from being barely noticeable or not noticeable at all to hugely impactful life changing I can't hold a job, I cannot care for myself, et cetera. Right, there's a huge spectrum of impact as well, and so I suspect that that number is probably actually a little bit higher because some people that are in that pool probably aren't aware that well, okay, I mean, you just gave us a great example.
JB: You were in your late forties. You know later in life that you actually were diagnosed with ADHD and again, this self-diagnosis, which led to more of an official diagnosis, has clearly provided you with a much deeper self-awareness but also, I would think, also influences on how you approach work, because you had that period of time between jobs and, just for just because I think it's really cool, you spent a little bit of time as a finished carpenter, which I think is just a. I mean I think that would be really neat, but I think also it just gives you a different access and different level of work. But now you are back in the corporate world. If you will and thank you, by the way, just for sharing this with us I mean, and I think this is part of the process of helping people create an awareness how has all of this influenced or informed who you are now as a manager, staying out of the Bosshole zone, if you will?
RL: I'd say, first and foremost, it's just given me a lot more patience and empathy and not charging in and blindly assuming that I know all the details of someone's life, of what they're dealing with, what they're struggling with, all the challenges that are on their plate, not to mention all the diverse abilities and goals and desires that they bring to the table.
If someone's a word processor, they work with documents all day long. Okay, that doesn't mean that that's the limit of their ambition or their interest. It may be that that's all they can manage right now, just due to the low complexity of a role. For instance, maybe they're taking care of their elderly parents and they've got three kids in school and they're trying to keep a house, whatever. So it's given me a lot of empathy and led me to avoid assumptions a great deal and instead actually just kind of having a series of conversations and sharing things about myself and my own vulnerabilities and fears and uncertainties and doubts, modeling that behavior so that they feel more comfortable doing that themselves if they're at that place, but at the very least signaling the fact that they're going to be taken at face value. It's not going to be assumptions made about them and I'm going to definitely go out of my way to make our relationship a more effective one.
JB: Yeah, yep. So that leads me to sometimes when, just to let our listeners know, you and I had a chance to talk a few weeks ago just to prepare and talk about well, you and I hadn't talked in a couple of years and it was like good to see you and you were sharing with me one of the part of your I don't want to call it a methodology part of your approach, if you will in helping others understand you better, and you referred to as a user's manual for a manager. Tell us more. I think this is ingenious. That's going to be the title for this episode, but I want our new experienced perspective managers and supervisors out there to listen to this, because I think this is a transformative sort of thing in terms of working relationships between managers and direct reports. So tell us about the user manual.
RL: Well, I've got to give credit to a good friend of mine I won't name him, he's an old buddy of mine and I asked him. I said, hey, what's the best way to communicate this to the team, this being my eccentricities, my ways of doing things, of communicating? An example is, oftentimes, if I'm in a group meeting people don't know me, et cetera, they might see my face and think, wow, he's pissed off, he's angry or bored or something's really bothering him, et cetera. In fact, my name being Rich or Richard, I like to say I have resting Rich face, and so that's the headline for one of the slides in this measurement.
JB: There you go, okay.
RL: The things that are divergent about me, right, okay, that's all. That's part of the user manual.
Okay, part of the user manual. And so now my colleagues, my reports, et cetera. They know that, just because I look like a angry person on a call, that that's not reflective of my mental state, right, I could be concentrating, listening or focused on something, and that immediately puts them at ease. They no longer have this internal dialogue thinking oh, what did I do, right?
So communicating this kind of thing, being vulnerable in this way, having a user manual, it helps to diffuse, to prevent a lot of misunderstandings in the future, and it signals a place for reciprocity. In other words, I have this manual. Wouldn't it be great if you had this manual too? Because I would have the same kind of insights you're having about me, right, and we would be able to work together more equitably and more efficiently. And I asked my friends how can I communicate this stuff? And he said well, what I did? I created this user manual. I'm like what are you talking about? He showed me.
I'm like, okay, this is exactly, this is perfect, this is exactly what I'm going to use, and I basically put things in there around. Okay, stereotypical, you know who am I, what are my hobbies, life, kids, and blah, blah blah. But I also put in preferences for communication, how I like to communicate, how I like to communicate with me, how I like people to approach me with ideas, what I like to reward in the workplace initiative, research, a bias for action, things like that. Preferences, workplace preferences, communication styles, anything that that might help someone interact with me in the workplace more effectively, got it and perhaps be able to predict my, my reaction to something or get a sense of of how I might work on different types of projects or different scopes of work. We're having a workshop coming up here in the next few weeks and I'm definitely going to push for all of my leaders to do this sort of activity.
So they're comfort level. I mean, it is being vulnerable and you can't mandate vulnerability, or at least you shouldn't, right? Yeah, you have to model it. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yep, but I would love to see leadership across every organization have this approach where there is a recognition that we're all people, we're all unique and we have our own ways of doing things. So why not equip our colleagues with tools so that they can work with us more effectively?
JB: No doubt, this to me represents Richard, sort of the new way to work we talk about I said it before reinventing the workplace, reinventing the manager. This is, I guarantee we have managers out there thinking he does what he puts together, what for his direct reports, and this is so foreign and different that but it shouldn't be. This should be how we connect with people and we show that vulnerability, that transparency to say this is who I am. And if you think I have all the answers, I do not. I think together we can find the answers, but I love this. I just love the user manual concept. So let me ask you this when you started to share this with your direct reports and people around you, I've got to believe you had some people go wow, I've never seen this before. I mean, you had to get some pretty interesting reactions.
RL: To be clear, it was not just direct reports, also peers or people up and down the organization.
JB: Okay, fair enough.
RL: There's definitely a sense of a little bit of disbelief. Incredulous, like what are they showing me? That's personal, they're sharing something personal that we've just met.
JB: Yeah.
RL: Yeah, and I don't feel like I stand to lose anything by sharing this. No, I feel like I'm gaining something For sure. So it does require you to be comfortable to a degree in yourself and with what you're sharing, but I don't see it as losing anything, being diminished in any way.
JB: I would think it would be somewhat freeing because you have opened yourself up, you have invited that from other people and I mean it sounds like you are certainly encouraging it by modeling it, and I don't want to step over that, Richard. I think that's really critical. One of the basic tenets of excellent leadership and management is to model what you hope others will embody or embrace if they are able to and if they are willing to. But you can't mandate it, you cannot force that. So I think that's a really important distinction right there. Do you have a sense of how it will be received more broadly with other leaders in the organization, or is it still too early to tell?
RL: I think it's still too early to tell. I mean, I've definitely seen a positive reception and there are a couple of kind of spinoff activities I'll call them that have perhaps descended from this putting up a mirror or mural type whiteboards and sharing details about one's life, hobbies or passions, family or whatever. Seeing more of that and that's kind of a little bit of a ladder effect up to what I'm talking about, got it.
That's being more open and vulnerable in terms of sharing things about you, but not necessarily things that are quite as nuts and bolts as communication styles and what you inherently value in reports or in supervision, et cetera.
JB: Right, got it. Well, I got to tell you I love the idea of the user manual. I think that is very powerful. I don't know, maybe you have a book in this, maybe you've already thought about that.
RL: There's a book in here somewhere. I don't think it's just the user manual. I think it's more in terms of applying a concept that I want to mention here so people can Google it. Okay, it's called "Universal Design. Okay, and universal design is basically. It's called a process, but it's also a concept Creating products or services that are accessible to people with a wide range of abilities Okay, or disabilities or other characteristics.
And a classic example of universal design is if you're traversing a city street and you have to step from the street to the curb, let's just step up, right. Well, that might be problematic for some people. If they can't step, maybe they're permanently disabled, or maybe they're temporarily disabled by carrying a child or a bag of groceries, or they broke their foot. So there are degrees of disability in any given scenario. There's a spectrum of disability, and if you design products and services such that people across that spectrum are able to use the thing, it's a better product, it's a better service, it's a better thing. And so if you apply universal design as a tenant to things like meeting process okay, I'm going to set up a meeting for my coworkers.
Okay, great, click, click, click done, okay. Or I can actually take some time and think about it. I'm going to actually provide an agenda up front and that's going to let people who have cognitive issues with needing to know what we're going to talk about before we talk about it. That's important for some people, myself included. So if I include an agenda, I'm catering to universal design precepts. If I send out action items afterwards and decisions, if I request that when people are sharing, giving reports on the latest budget, whatever, if they can use visuals, that's going to help some people that have certain types of cognitive issues. They can ingest and retain information much more effectively with a visual.
Well, there's a whole suite of things that are very applicable to the workplace that can be done and would improve the culture, the awareness and acceptance of neurodivergence in the workplace if those habits were onboarded.
And that's, I think, maybe where the book lies is figuring out how to communicate ways to effectively do that in an organization so that your workplace, your workers, are much more comfortable, much more effective and efficient and will stick with you, keeping that engagement level high and retention high. Yeah, so we've seen a lot of strides being made in company culture these days right, where entire organizations are owning the fact that they could do better when it comes to workplace policies and attitudes. We've seen a lot of progress in terms of gender identity and sexual preference and religion, race, ethnicity. There's not been a lot of progress made in terms of acceptance and awareness of neurodivergence. Right, and being someone who's neurodivergent is as much a factor of one's identity as it is their capability and their preferences, and if you engage with this in the workplace, you're going to have a far more positive outcome, a hundred times out of a hundred, than if you sort of ignore that whole dimension.
JB: Absolutely.
RL: One of the obstacles to me learning this about myself earlier were my own biases.
JB: Okay, tell us a little bit more about those.
RL: I had the assumption through most of my adult life that someone with autism was visibly autistic. They had a certain look about them, certain mannerisms that were very obvious to anyone around them, and a good example of that is Dustin Hoffman's character in "Rain Man. Is this brilliant but eccentric and definitely disabled individual this character? They're capable of great feats of mathematics, but they can't do the simplest tasks. They can tie their shoes, et cetera. In my mind, that's how you had to be in order to be autistic, and so it was certainly an attitude like that, or attitudes like that that are perpetuated by Hollywood, by modern culture, that have led a lot of us to have these biases that block our ability to consider whether someone might be neurodivergent Right, and oftentimes, if someone owns up and say, hey, you know, I actually am autistic, et cetera, there's a tendency to perhaps disbelieve them.
JB: Because you're looking, you're looking at it through that other lens.
RL: Through that other lens.
JB: Yeah.
RL: You can't be autistic because you've held a high paying job Right your whole life, you've managed people or you're you're a parent, et cetera. All these things that have to do with someone's capability or their accomplishments as perceived reasons why they can't have certain conditions. Yeah, and that's just silly. I mean there, there are people out there that are way smarter than I am, that aren't able to, for example, tie their shoes, but there's also people that are as smart as I am, or smarter, and they're able to do just everything in life just perfectly fine.
Yeah, absolutely. Under the cover, though, they're probably undergoing a great deal of stress and anxiety and putting forth a great deal more energy. I believe your guest, Nancy, had alluded to some of that. And so doing the same things or doing things that require a high degree of skill, that's not off the table for someone with neurodivergent issues. It will take them more time or more energy or cost more pain than it would a neurotypical person. That's really the only truism that applies to capability across the board.
JB: It sounds like the takeaway there, Richard, is add that to the many biases we typically have when we see somebody and we look at them and we automatically make assertions or assumptions about who they are and how they are. Thank you for sharing that. That's a powerful perspective, very yeah.
RL: Just like any kind of biases. It's important not to punish yourself for having a bias. It's important to recognize that this is how you were nurtured and you've adapted this mindset over time, but now you're aware of it and you're taking steps to mitigate it, and it's important to give yourself some credit for that as you engage with the world moving forward.
JB: Well, Richard, thank you so much for this. The insights have been amazing and I want to remind everybody to go to the show notes and you'll see all kinds of resources there to help us expand our understanding of neurodiversity, of understanding it and its role in the workplace. And just thank you for broadening our world through your own lived experience. It's been great having you here.
RL: Thank you, John. It's been a pleasure talking about this stuff. I hope that what folks hear today has a measurable impact on how they handle these topics in the workplace.
JB: I have no doubt that it will. Thanks so much, and thanks everybody for listening in and we'll see you next time on the Bosshole Chronicles. We'd like to thank our guests today on the Bosshole Chronicles and if you have a Bosshole Chronicles story of your own, please email us at mystory@thebossholechronicles.com. Once again, mystory@thebossholechronicles.com, we'll see you again soon.