Few words, big impact
It was an exchange that couldn’t have lasted more than 15 seconds. In a hallway. Almost a quarter-century ago. But I remember it like it was yesterday.
“I just want you to know, the work you’ve been doing is quite good.”
“Umm… thank you!”
As pixels on a screen years later, out of context, the words don’t mean much. They did back then. This was a huge ego boost exactly when I needed one, and from the least likely but most powerful of sources.
The speaker was Gene Robinson, the general manager of WMBD-TV, Peoria’s CBS affiliate. And the recipient was 20-year-old me, an intern and journalism student. He had been running the station longer than I’d been alive.
In most TV stations, then as now, the GM would have no reason to know what the interns are doing — and less reason to interact with them. But Peoria was a small enough market back then, and my college newscast experience apparently sufficient, that my internship responsibilities included reporting the news on air. In front of actual viewers. Sometimes live.
Crazy, right? Sure, I looked a little older than I was and could act the part, dressed in my JC Penney college finest. And though they seemed like real grown-ups, with apartments and regular paychecks and such, most of my colleagues in the newsroom were not more than a couple of years my senior. Still, an actual station in an actual midsize city in the state of my birth was putting me on television before I was old enough to buy myself a beer.
I was simultaneously living the dream of my young life, and scared shitless.
It was the world’s craziest cocktail of adrenaline and cortisol: the rush of a deadline, the demanding glare of studio lights and the knowledge that tens of thousands of people were watching from the other side of the lens. My idealist young self felt like the latest guardian of a somewhat-sacred trust between viewer and journalist: to tell the truth, to do it ethically, in between the commercials for who-knows-what that were the price of admission in the relationship. Yes, you put a stick microphone in the hands of this guy, and he’s going to take the job seriously. And all of this in the head of a shy, introverted person who wasn’t used to talking to strangers — yet wanted to do it for a living.
No way Gene Robinson knew all of this was in my head. But he knew who this intern was and what I was doing because he tuned in at 5, 6 and 10 just like the rest of his station’s audience. And he took time out of his busy day to tell me he thought highly of my work. If he’s still alive,* I’m quite sure he has forgotten this moment, my face, my name among the hundreds of people who have worked at CBS 31 since my 3-month stint there during the first Clinton administration.
It would take some hard work, plenty of learning and a good number of mistakes — some of them unfortunately public — but I would emerge from that internship with skills, connections and a demo tape that later led to my first full-time job out of college in a neighboring market. I got to work for the late, inimitable Dave Shaul, one of the best leaders I’ve encountered before or since.
Mr. Robinson’s compliment didn’t make all of this possible, of course. It did, however, give me some much-needed confidence that I would make it in this competitive and highly-visible business.
In short, something the chief executive said had a significant, positive and lasting impact on a subordinate. That is the power we have as leaders, and also our responsibility. It is a simple thing to do, and it comes at very little cost.
While claiming no credit for the idea, I’m fond of saying that leaders make the weather. If you mutter something offhand when you’re having a bad day, you’ve got an excellent chance of ruining someone else’s. But the converse is also true.
Who can you inspire today in the hallway with a few well-timed words?
(Originally posted on Medium)
*January 8, 2024 update: A member of Mr. Robinson’s family saw this post and contacted me to let me know he had passed away a few weeks earlier. She wanted to thank me for the comfort my words had provided during her family’s time of loss. His gift to me had come full-circle.