Nearly 20 years ago I started a job at the largest corporation I ever worked for during my professional career. It was one of the businesses written about in a popular book on companies at the time. Most of the employees had worked at the company all their working career. I was an outsider, brought in with a few others for skills the company needed.
The company had a deep culture. One of the things given to me on my first day was a list of acronyms that I needed to know. It was pages long. Some acronyms were industry standards. Many were unique to the business. It was surreal.
My boss was a southern woman of small stature. Her personality was so large that I didn’t notice I was nearly a foot taller than she was for nearly three months. She had a military style haircut and a deep southern accent.
She gave me a list of people I needed to meet my first day and told me to set up the meetings. She highlighted those I should meet in my first three months and told me I should meet the rest soon afterward. The contact locations were in the US and a handful of other countries. She told me who to contact to get travel visas and sent me to my office to figure things out.
After I’d been with the company a few weeks, another fairly new employee, a research and development manager, decided the company was not a place he wanted to work. I soon found out why because I was asked to take over the high profile project he was running. The project involved a product deficiency that resulted in a recall from the market. My task was to get the product back on the market as soon as possible. Yesterday, as they say, was the expectation.
The team that had been put together thought they had a solution. They’d tried a few things, they’d tested a handful of samples, and they were ready to relaunch the product with a new design. I was shocked when I reviewed their report. The product was life sustaining and they’d only tested five samples from each test group.
I went into my boss’s office to tell her the team was way off base. I was passionate and angry because I thought the company expected me to rubberstamp something that could result in me being fined and potentially jailed. My boss, Rose, told me something I’ll never forget. She said, “They aren’t bad people. They just don’t understand. It’s your job to help them understand.”
I did. It wasn’t easy. Rose helped me through it. She taught me a lot about people, a lot about myself, and a lot about leadership. She was the most influential teacher I ever had.
A Different Way 
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