Leaders Have to Be Plumbers Too (Or Something Like That)

A leader has to be many things to many men. But this is one of the best descrip­tions I’ve ever heard of what a leader is.

FROM TERRY STARBUCKER:

Some­times a leader needs to think like a plumber.

Yep, a plumber.

How so? Think about pres­sure for a minute. A plumber deals with pres­sure all the time – in their case, water pressure.

How it is con­trolled and directed is crit­i­cal to the over­all per­for­mance of a water cir­cu­la­tion sys­tem, espe­cially when heated water is involved.

Con­se­quently, plumbers know all about safety valves and their ben­e­fits when the pres­sure gets too high.

And that’s where a leader can learn a lot from a plumber.

Lead­ers deal with pres­sure all the time – both exter­nally and inter­nally. This pres­sure can gen­er­ate much “over­heated” energy, and get to the boil­ing point of anger.

That’s where a safety valve is needed– some­thing that can eas­ily and effec­tively “release” the pres­sure with­out caus­ing any harm.

When it comes to your team­mates, that safety valve is you. You must pro­vide an safe out­let to release that pres­sure. Team­mates must feel com­fort­able walk­ing into your office, or call­ing you on the phone, to express their anger or frustration.

And you must be able to patiently lis­ten to this pres­sure release, and not fun­nel it to any other dan­ger­ous place, or worse yet, go the oppo­site direc­tion and build the pres­sure up to the point of an explo­sion. It must dis­si­pate harm­lessly, so any under­ly­ing issues can be dealt with calmly and rationally.

It’s a leader fac­ing real­ity – and under­stand­ing the per­son­al­i­ties of every­one on the team. Every­body gets unhappy with some­thing at one point or another. The key to suc­cess­fully han­dling this unhap­pi­ness is to make sure it gets directed at you, rather than spread like a virus around you.

Put it this way – wouldn’t you rather take the time to lis­ten to some­one vent to you, rather than have that per­son con­tinue to build unre­leased anger and resent­ment, which undoubt­edly could “leak” out to other team­mates and cre­ate mass dishar­mony and a decrease in team effectiveness?

I know it takes a lot of patience to be a safety valve – but in the end, it pays off. Encour­age your team­mates to speak to you FIRST any time the pres­sure is too great, and their anger has built up. When they do call to vent, lis­ten atten­tively (hope­fully you’ve gone through my “Vir­tual Q-Tip” exer­cise). 9 times out of 10, the release will be all they need – and the valve will have done its job.

Occa­sion­ally, the anger and pres­sure is so great that you can’t reduced it enough – and that’s when you have to move beyond merely act­ing as a valve by tran­si­tion­ing to a teacher and counselor.

I’ve learned this the hard way over my many years in the busi­ness world, espe­cially when I didn’t have a safety valve man­ager of my own.

Unchecked and unre­leased anger can be a killer to any orga­ni­za­tion, but think like a plumber, and you’ll be just fine.

And you don’t even need a wrench.