Jones' Two Leadership Rules

Jones’ Two Leadership Rules

John Paul Derryberry

I have about seven weeks to go until I complete the seventh year of leading a non-profit. I spent two years at a homeless shelter and now, five years leading an expanding employment and transitional living service agency. I have leaned on many leaders who have impacted me through the years. For some of them, I took mental notes of how to lead; from many, I took mental notes of how not to lead. It is crucial to figure out how and how not to do it. Most fail to focus on how not to do it and end up never figuring out that there are numerous wrong ways to lead people. The look of confusion, on leaders who go astray with their choices, always gives me a good chuckle because their mistakes are mostly a lack of understanding. People do not follow leaders; they follow leaders they are connected to. 

Now, I'm not a perfect leader, probably because the two leadership rules I follow most closely come from my favorite leader, who was undoubtedly not an ideal leader. I know she feels this way because she told me numerous times, while she led our program, that she screwed stuff up all the time. Theresa Jones, whom I wrote about long ago as the greatest boss ever, has come to mind a lot this past four weeks as I entered a challenging new phase of my leadership journey. We often need to remember where we came from, and due to how well Theresa treated me and the team I worked for, I remember my start as a frontline staff. My extended stay, as a frontline staff member, is embedded in my DNA as a leader now, and I often fall back on those two rules Jones drilled into 

Jones rule #1: The first rule Theresa gave me was to stop worrying about other programs and people. With a program just five feet from ours, getting into the back-and-forth drama of it all was easy. Who got paid the most, who was doing a better job, and who had the most demanding clients? I often got angry looking across that hall, thinking about the opinions that were held about our program vs their program. Theresa pulled me into her office one day and asked me to focus all my energy on our program for one month and forget everything else. I wondered why, and she said, let's see what happens. 

Lo and behold, she was correct. The minor annoyance of comparing drifted away, and my work with my team took shape and mattered. I compared my results to my results. See, it's easy to get caught up in all that. Look at a salary study that compares your salary to all the other wages of similar positions around the state, and you can easily convince yourself you are underpaid. But those comparisons do not take into account the state of your program, all the variables that make your situation yours. You may be overpaid, or perhaps you are underpaid. But instead of focusing on leading, now you are focused on pay. Those are two very different mindsets. It’s been. my experience pay comes with running a great program. Jones rule #1: focus on your program, what you can control, and let the other stuff disappear. We got better as a team, I got better as an employee, and we helped more clients find stability, hope, and laughter, and all of a sudden, what others did- -didn't seem such a big deal. 

Jones rule #2: allow others to be great at what they do, which was such a turning point in my career. I was struggling to reach a client, so I asked my leader what I should do. Her response was, I don't know, you are better at intervening than I am, so do what you think is best. It was the first time a leader acknowledged that I might have a better skill set than theirs and that my idea would better solve the situation. Recognizing and promoting, that a staff's skill set is better than yours, is a rare leadership trait. Only came across it twice in my life. It's wholly unselfish and shows it is about the best ideas winning out, especially when discussing my line of work. 

Theresa was rough around the edges; she would cut you down with a biting comment, was not afraid of conflict, and would call you out. Yet under all of it was this person who cared so much about doing the job correctly; she led in such a way that her team couldn't help but follow her. I know for a fact a bunch of others in the agency did not like how she led, because she protected frontline staff, but she didn't care because she was following rule #1: stay focused on your own program, your own stuff, remain engaged with the work; the rest was noise. For some reason, she loved me, a stubborn young professional who bucked authority, looked for conflict, and tried to joke his way out of every write-up he had coming his way. Now, I try to lead like her; but please don't tell her, because she would never let me hear the end of admitting she was right.