In the mid-1990s a research-minded class of e-commerce websites was incubated in Chicago's Gothic Tribune Tower.
We all lead by design. My first Chicago Tribune web project taught me about leadership styles and the value of a team.
In 1997 I started working in a cramped suite on an upper floor of Tribune Tower. Desks were pushed together to hold boxy computer monitors, and the worn linoleum floor tiles showed cement below. Not much different from my old spot on the Chicago Sun-Times copy desk, but now I was building websites for the Chicago Tribune.
None of us in the room had built much more than a home page before, but months earlier our publisher Owen Youngman had launched chicago.tribune.com. (It took another year for Tribune to buy the chicagotribune.com domain—tribune.com was just fine for the whole chain, thank you.) I'd quit the Sun-Times business section. Building websites seemed more interesting than writing about them.
We were a roomful of hyphenates. Mike DiGioia, the art director, was a zine editor and Cuba tourist. Brian Neale our automotive expert, was a sportswriter who rode his motorcycle to the Tower. Ernesto Perez was a designer-DJ, Elise Bittner a travel writer-chef, Jayne Lilienfeld an ecologist-sculptor, Marilia Gutierrez a reporter-interpreter.
Editor Bill Swislow had published a Tribune business digest via the new medium of fax machine, and a personal home page with cultural critiques of Nancy and Sluggo comics. He dabbled in outsider art, and kept Martin Denny LPs propped up against his desk lamp just for the kitsch of it. All of us had multiple interests, a good plan if you're not sure exactly what skills you'll eventually need.
New media, new rules
This team taught me more about leadership than when I was bossing around reporters. Though I was an officer in my professional society, I hadn't seen myself as a leader. Bosses had tough names and tough reputations. Ken Lay. Mike Ditka. Chainsaw Al Dunlap. Neutron Jack Welch. The Sun-Times newsroom was full of gruff J. Jonah Jameson types to my neurotic Peter Parker. On the business beat, corporate chieftains were losers if they weren't following Welch's lead and firing 10% of their staff as slackers.
There's more than one way to lead, though, and the internet was here to school us. Youngman admitted he didn't have all the answers. "Every day I'm going to make a wrong decision," Youngman would say. "No one knows what will prove to be right. Still, if I don't make decisions I'll miss opportunities." Although surfing the web put Youngman in rough waters, he had started new sections of the Tribune, and was convinced that the internet was more than a fad. His enthusiasm for an unproven medium made him a persuasive leader.
Youngman had remade the Tribune's classified ad pages by making them more useful, swaddling them in how-to articles. Online we went a step further, linking real estate classified ads to neighborhood profiles. At the Sun-Times I'd been a stats nerd, anchoring median price charts to the Homelife section. At the Tribune I published individual listings with their sales histories and school scores. That would have been a radical notion in print, where advertisers had the last word on copy. But here we were setting new rules.
Swislow was in a hurry to build the business case for the internet. He gave me a database to pull stats together, plus more software for Gantt charts to mark deadlines. He Working late hours was a point of pride, or so he instructed me. Call him a pacesetting leader.
DiGioia was a natural instructor, showing me how to fix broken code, and the group's cheerleader, organizing lunch excursions or Art Institute trips to get both sides of our brain working. His computer doubled as a CD player for Stereolab or some other trippy alt-rock. He was He needed no manager title to be a people-focused leader.
Web-slinging innovations
As a manager, I struggled to bark out orders. While that might have seemed feckless at Peter Parker's tabloid Daily Bugle, in our universe we all followed our spidey sense in the same direction. There were a range of leadership styles in play.
Personalities aren't black and white, and the effective leader can move between autocrat and laissez-faire, from risk taker to trust builder. Youngman's vision thing wouldn't work if we weren't ready for change. Butt-kicking micromanagers drove me off the city desk, and wouldn't have worked in this room full of specialists. But when time is too short to build consensus, someone has to give orders.
In the back of the room were Nat Sheppard, former foreign correspondent and AOL's "Dr. Love;" Roxann Krull, the artist behind the Tribune's prototypal advertising microsites; and Grover Sanschagrin, sports photographer and server savant. There was a logic to bringing smartest people in the newsroom together.
Science writer Isaac Asimov cited Darwin's theory of evolution as an example of how ideas converge. Darwin traveled widely and were curious about all the varieties in plants and animals. So did naturalist Alfred Wallace. Both read Malthus and made similar, less-than-obvious connections between humans in his “Essay on Population" and species in general. The idea was simultaneously original and just something in the air.
Shifting leadership styles
These days, command-and-control structures are in eclipse, and General Electric has ended rank and yank. Workers are praised for their superpowers, not punished for shortcomings.
It's good to place yourself on the continuum to understand your leadership strengths. One way is to ask friends and co-workers how they see you. Even if you've never thought to ask, they might have given it away when asking for your opinion. Are they looking for the next step, or the big picture?
More ways to get in touch with your strengths were suggested in the American Bar Association's 2018 Well-Being Toolkit. One is taking the Values in Action survey, a quiz on personal style. Results can be surprising: I don't think of myself as particularly brave, but on the test I strongly identify with honesty and perseverance, both products of bravery. Such traits lead people to organizations that support the rule of law. Journalism. Compliance. The deep state.
In the early days of the internet I was a student of newsroom styles. I thought reporters were from Mars and editors from Venus, at least the creative ones that weren't circling Uranus. Editors used empathy to stand in for their readers. So I embraced design thinking, the brainstorming and experimentation techniques that early websites used to anticipate audience needs.
We all lead by design. Any project of lasting value needs a team to nurture and strengthen it. Design thinking now is taught in business school. Leaders solve today's problems with the same techniques we used to invent the internet. Mostly, we all get it right.
The current state of the web reflects what we built more than 20 years ago in that small room, websites that revolved around homes and cars and work and travel. We were curious about what this odd new tool could do, and working together we figured it out. That was leadership at a higher level.
No comments:
Post a Comment