Leaders and Their Stories

Richard Lowe: Hello. This is Richard Lowe.

Richard Lowe: And this is the leaders and their stories. Podcast I'm the writing king and

Richard Lowe: ghostwriting, Guru. And I'm here with Sean, who's going to talk to us about what leadership looks like from the employee or contractor level, and especially the negative side of leadership. And what could be done instead of that. So, Sean, can you introduce yourself

Shawn and Carey Abeling: Yes, my name is Shawn Abling, and I have had many experiences with both good and bad leadership on both sides of the aisle. Actually, I was contractor, union worker, lead installer. I

Shawn and Carey Abeling: did pretty much all of that

Richard Lowe: Sounds very interesting. I know I've had my share of bad leaders. In fact, I have difficulty thinking of a good one. But you know. So what would you say is the sign of a bad leader? What do you? What? What is a red flag

Shawn and Carey Abeling: A red flag for me is one that really doesn't lead by example.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: When I when I'm working for someone, I want someone that leads by example, if they're if they're going to. If they want me working hard, I would like to be seeing them working hard as well. I understand that's not always possible, but

Shawn and Carey Abeling: that that's a biggie for me.

Richard Lowe: I see. So give me an example of somebody leading by example

Shawn and Carey Abeling: So we're leading by example.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: is someone like. Whenever I was a installer for lucent, we had some in some

Shawn and Carey Abeling: in charges that would sit there hand out job assignments, and then they really wouldn't do much else other than that they expected. The other people, the minions.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: the people making the lowest amount of money possible.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: and do all the work. I understand that. When you gain seniority you earn that right, but

Shawn and Carey Abeling: it's not always good to have

Shawn and Carey Abeling: people making 3 to 4 times less than you.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: You're making 3 to 4 times more than them.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: and they see you sitting around, not really doing much at all.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: It doesn't really do well with morale, and it

Shawn and Carey Abeling: really doesn't make them want to work

Richard Lowe: Yeah, that's true. That's true. When employees see

Richard Lowe: if you have, say, a bunch of employees who are doing well, and then you they you hire somebody even. Let's just say you hire somebody that's their peer, and that peer is a bad apple and doesn't, doesn't

Richard Lowe: do? Well, the quote leader quote who lets them get away with it.

Richard Lowe: which is a form of bad leadership, then lets everybody else know that they can get away with it, and that tends to produce a whole barrel full of rotten apples.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: You.

Richard Lowe: And that's I've seen that many, many times, and the current thing where it's hard to fire people

Richard Lowe: or let them go, or whatever

Richard Lowe: makes us even worse, because then these rotten apples stay around. Now, I'm not in favor of firing people for little reason. Obviously, reasons are needed and good justifications, but when somebody's not doing their job

Richard Lowe: they should probably be retrained, transferred.

Richard Lowe: fired whatever's appropriate, rather than keeping them in the same barrel, and let all the other apples rot. You need to show the troops that you don't put up with crap

Shawn and Carey Abeling: Exactly, and with the in charge being a Union member also, they really can't fire or anything else. All they can do is just call up their supervisor and say, Hey, we don't really need this guy here anymore. We don't have enough work for him. So then they transfer him over to

Shawn and Carey Abeling: back to. They usually did back to the tool room, and then from the tool room they would go out to other job sites, and and if they got passed around enough times, then the supervisors realize that he's a bad apple, and then they try to

Shawn and Carey Abeling: get rid of them. But being a union. It's really hard for the company to fire someone

Richard Lowe: Yes, I know that

Shawn and Carey Abeling: And it was really bad with this, because we worked all over

Shawn and Carey Abeling: all over the area. We didn't have just one location that everybody worked in, so one supervisor would have anywhere between 3 to 8 different job sites.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: and he can't be at all of them at all times.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: and he's supposed to spend certain amount of time at the home base as well his office to get paperwork and stuff done.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: So it it really got

Shawn and Carey Abeling: bad with having a lot of bad apples, because, I mean, there's I worked alongside a lot of people that did maybe 15 min worth of work and a total of.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: and 12 h shift

Richard Lowe: I've seen that it's con. It can be common even in non-union shops. People find out how to

Richard Lowe: how to get away with not doing work or or do make work, make it look like they're busy when they're really not.

Richard Lowe: Now, one thing I like to think about is what is the definition of a leader to me.

Richard Lowe: You see all these definitions. You know, servant leader, this kind of leader, that kind of leader. But a lever leader is really simple. The definition is simple. It's in the name

Richard Lowe: person who leads

Richard Lowe: somebody who takes to the group and moves them in the direction that the business or organization wants them to go.

Richard Lowe: How that gets done is the type of leadership. So servant leadership, you know

Richard Lowe: different kinds of things. That's a that's a type of leadership.

Richard Lowe: A lot of people mistake that as leadership leadership is simply getting people to go in the right direction.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: That's that's basically what it is.

Richard Lowe: And then there's techniques for doing it.

Richard Lowe: And lots of things work like

Richard Lowe: servant leadership might not work as well in, say, a battle like you know, and fighting in the Ukraine. I doubt if you got servant leaders, or you got leaders who are like. Do this, because that's what's necessary.

Richard Lowe: Perhaps I'm I'm hypothesizing. There, that's a great word hypothesizing

Shawn and Carey Abeling: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: So what you want is a leader who

Richard Lowe: move the group forward towards the goals of the business.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, and factoring in the goals of the individuals, I would say also, and that are part of the group, and the group, and so forth.

Richard Lowe: So he's he's got a wide variety of jobs.

Richard Lowe: Now, if that entails the leader sitting on a butt.

Richard Lowe: or if the leader's doing the work.

Richard Lowe: the key is is that leader

Richard Lowe: causing the group to move in a direction at the appropriate speed in the appropriate direction, and getting the appropriate products

Shawn and Carey Abeling: Yep.

Richard Lowe: The answer is, yes doesn't matter if the leader is not doing anything. The answer is, no, it matters

Richard Lowe: to me. That's that's the way I look at it now

Shawn and Carey Abeling: Good.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: Yeah. I was just gonna mention that there's like, like I was saying, some of the in charges. There's 1 in charge I worked for he had not gotten a job turned in on time.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: 15 years that my buddies worked there.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: Everyone turned it on time, and they weren't able to do anything about the

Shawn and Carey Abeling: like. I said the supervisors weren't able to do anything about it because he's union. He's got a bunch of seniority because he's been there 30 plus years.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: and I mean it's

Shawn and Carey Abeling: that's 1 of the places they send people to try to fire him is they put him. They put him on his job sites, and they show up regularly on those job sites, and they catch them when they're supposed to be working.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: took a long time for them to do any of that

Richard Lowe: Of course, of course.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: That's actually how that's actually how I got

Shawn and Carey Abeling: pushed into being an in charge was

Shawn and Carey Abeling: I had a bunch in charges taking credit for my work. So I got put with this guy.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: and he actually got his job done on time for the 1st time ever

Richard Lowe: Interesting.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: Because I went in there, and I did all the work I gave him 15 min worth of stuff to do. He couldn't get 15 min of stuff done.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: and that was just because I wanted to do something on his own job.

Richard Lowe: Right.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: And yeah, that guy was that guy was a big time character which we won't really get into. But

Richard Lowe: Yeah, I understand. Yeah, no need to get into personalities. And people here

Shawn and Carey Abeling: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: More on a general level.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, I mean,

Richard Lowe: so that to me, that's that's what leadership is. It's being able to lead a group

Richard Lowe: to where you want to go. I look at the old leaders from the past, Julius Caesar.

Richard Lowe: He was right at the head of the troops. He was right there in the middle, so he'd be out in the charge. Alexander the Great, Patten. These are all leaders who were in basically along with the troops

Richard Lowe: doing doing the job with them. They weren't afraid to do the job. Then you have the leaders that failed. Most of them aren't remembered anymore

Richard Lowe: because they weren't at the front. You've got the whole Vietnam fiasco within America and Vietnam.

Richard Lowe: The leaders were actually back here in the States.

Richard Lowe: They weren't even in Vietnam.

Richard Lowe: So of course it failed. They they didn't even know what was going on.

Richard Lowe: Many reasons

Shawn and Carey Abeling: Yeah. By the time they knew it was

Shawn and Carey Abeling: going on it was already too late to do anything about it.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: Yeah. And and my understanding time difference

Richard Lowe: My understanding, speaking to some veterans from that era is, they had so many rules of engagement and things that were so weird that

Richard Lowe: there was no way to win.

Richard Lowe: They they, you know, you can only fight under these conditions. You can only blah blah. And it was like you're either in a war or you're not.

Richard Lowe: And if you're not in a war, then what are you doing here?

Richard Lowe: Yeah, you know, is it a shooting war, isn't it.

Richard Lowe: Oh, yeah.

Richard Lowe: And Ukraine, of course they have no back off on.

Richard Lowe: hey? You show your head. You did

Shawn and Carey Abeling: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: Either side either side. So interest. I find that interesting that a leader also is

Richard Lowe: a good leader is also not afraid to be embedded with the people he, he or she leads

Shawn and Carey Abeling: Yep.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: that's when I got to being in charge I end up getting all. I was one of the best in charges I got laid off because I didn't have the seniority. But I mean those same guys that were doing 15 to 20 min worth of work in a 12 h shift were working their butts off to be on my crew.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: and they're working right alongside me, hustling everything. And that was because I was right there working with them. I did the job right alongside them.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: cause I mean being in a union. You're all

Shawn and Carey Abeling: you're all at the same level. Basically, you're all supposed to be in there doing that job. You're hired to do a job. You're supposed to be doing that job.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: and because I didn't sit down and just hand out job assignments. The people actually worked with me and they got the stuff done. And they

Shawn and Carey Abeling: I didn't have a problem getting them to work

Richard Lowe: Right.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: And then, whereas the other guys that were sitting around doing nothing they had like, oh, that guy's worthless. That guy's worthless. You don't want him on your crew.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: You worked fine for me.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. Well, it depends on the quality of the leader. A bad leader does not.

Richard Lowe: does not cause the troop. The people who work for that person to want to do something. They don't want to do it, because the leader's not good.

Richard Lowe: That's often because the leader's not embedded with them.

Richard Lowe: He's not he or she is not doing the appropriate

Richard Lowe: is not willing to do the work along with the people there.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. A lead. A good leader in my mind should not be afraid to go pick up the tools and start, you know, throwing a semi line and start screwing screwing screws and put the tires on every once in a while.

Richard Lowe: You know somebody needs help. Come, come out there and show them how to do it personally

Richard Lowe: to me. That's that's what a good leader does.

Richard Lowe: Bad leader is. Just gonna let it let it slide, or let somebody else handle it, or.

Richard Lowe: you know, not take care of it, basically not take care of it.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: Yeah.

Shawn and Carey Abeling: Yep.

Richard Lowe: So leadership is very interesting. It's there's a lot of books on leadership. I've written a few myself. I've ghostwritten a few. Oh, yeah, it's very interesting, the way that they

Richard Lowe: that leaders need to work. And the very the views on leadership are as diverse as there are

Richard Lowe: people on the planet

Richard Lowe: there. There's everybody has a different idea of leadership and a lot of them align in certain categories. There's there's this kind of leadership, that kind leadership that kind of leadership.

Richard Lowe: I'm sure the Union shops had leadership types enforced from above. The leader, the Union said, you're going to work this way.

Richard Lowe: You tell me

Shawn and Carey Abeling: I as an in charge. I never really got that. They had. They had it in the contract. What was expected, and

Shawn and Carey Abeling: you could do the bare minimum which is just hand out job assignments and make sure the work was done right

Shawn and Carey Abeling: Or you could go all the way to like I did. I went in there. I worked right alongside everybody. I actually most of the time I actually gave myself the hardest spot or hardest thing to do, and

Shawn and Carey Abeling: led that way. And like I said, I had people that

Shawn and Carey Abeling: had no problem working for me. They actually enjoyed it. They probably they preferred to be in on my job

Richard Lowe: People want to work. They want to do a good job generally. So if you let them do a good job and give them the tools that they need. They're going to do a good job

Shawn and Carey Abeling: Yup!

Richard Lowe: What I? What always affected me often was not the immediate manager or leader, but one several up the rungs up the ladder

Richard Lowe: where it have these weird rules and weird

Richard Lowe: goals and stuff that had no bearing in reality, and then have to deal with it. I'm sure you ran into that

Shawn and Carey Abeling: Oh, yeah, my wife is kind of going through that went through that recently. She's an X-ray tech

Shawn and Carey Abeling: or Ct tech now, and her supervisor, her not supervisor, but manager, decided that she wanted everybody to

Richard Lowe: You froze

Richard Lowe: well, looks like you froze. So I'm gonna just

Richard Lowe: finish it up. This is the leaders in their stories. Podcast I've been speaking with Sean Aveling, and we've been talking about leadership.

Richard Lowe: so thank you for coming, Sean. I don't know if you can hear me or not, and I appreciate your viewpoints on leadership.

Richard Lowe: And it's been a fun. Podcast thank you.