Rob Blevins

Executive Director, Discovery Center

Be careful around clocks.

My grandpa is 92 years old. He has owned and operated a business for over 50 years and is a wealth of knowledge. When I was starting my professional career, I was talking to him about my job when he stopped me and said, “Robbie, I had a job once where I looked at the clock to see if it was time to go home because I didn’t want to be there. If you find yourself looking at the clock to remind yourself that you need to get home, you need to go somewhere else.”

Notes:

Find the intersection of doing good and doing well.

This is my personal brand and business philosophy. As an English major, I love a good play on words, and as a business leader, I need something that can anchor my decision making. If a decision does something good and it also allows everyone involved to do well, especially financially, then you’ve found something that has the potential to be sustainable. Find opportunities that are not only the right thing to do morally or ethically speaking but that are also right for your business.

“Yes, but …”

“No, we can’t do that” or “That’s not possible” is a legitimate response you need to hear as a leader sometimes, but getting that routinely won’t allow your organization to do the hard things. And the most important things to do are usually the hardest things. Instead, train your team to say, “Yes, and we’ll have to figure out a way to get this other thing done before that is possible.” As a leader, one of your most important jobs is removing barriers to greatness. Impossible is always possible if you can find a way to solve all the things that were making it impossible.

You never have to grow up.

MLB player Chili Davis once said, “Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional.” I live by this. Choose to have fun whenever you can, and I’d imagine that you can choose to make what you do fun more often than you are right now. You can sing, whistle, laugh or smile while doing a lot of things, if you try. People like working around, for or with people that can make hard work fun.

Care about people.

When I train my leaders, I tell them their people need to know they care about them. In response, one of the people I was training once asked me how he could make people think that he cared about them. Here’s what I told him: There is no trick to it. There is no faking it. People can tell. You have to genuinely care. Show them in everything you do that you care more about them than most everything else. A team that knows you care about them can do great things.

It’s hard to perform when you don’t feel safe.

When you feel safe and secure, your body releases hormones that help you think more clearly and remember things better. A lack of these hormones can cause all kinds of unwanted behavior: anxiety, fear, irritability, distrust. Besides being the right thing to do for your people, it also makes good business sense to have people that are physically ready to do good work.

You don’t always have to fire someone for making a mistake.

One day, someone on your team is going to do something that makes them and everyone around them think they will be fired – and you’re going to keep them. You’re going to keep them because you know that they’ll never make that same mistake again, whereas the person you would have to hire to replace them might.

Let others tell you before you tell them

Ask lots of questions before saying what you think or taking any action. Investigate possible mistakes on the team with compassionate curiosity. Your people will appreciate the authenticity that comes from going on a fact-finding mission together. Making incorrect assumptions can destroy morale and tank a culture. Not only is it good for business to have people that feel heard; it’s also good for people to know you want to listen.

It’s important to be right, but it’s not important that you’re right.

We all like to be right. It’s not something to be ashamed of because it’s human nature, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t need to keep it in check or rein it in. This is one of those things that leaders have to sacrifice to become a good leader. We owe it to the people we lead, the organizations we manage or the missions we serve to make sure the decisions are right even if it means that we’re wrong.

The harder you work, the luckier you get.

This is a phrase a mentor once shared with me when I told her I

We tend to think that success doesn’t require luck, but you’ll discover that most successful people have been really lucky if you look long and hard enough. The good news is that luck isn’t always entirely up to chance. Luck can be manufactured through hard work. In fact, hard work often creates the opportunity to get lucky.