E-Book Review: I Have the Watch

Title: I Have the Watch

Author: Jon S. Rennie

Publisher: Jon S. Rennie

Date: 2019

ISBN: 978-1099487095

Length: 116 PDF pages

Quote: “If you’re a leader, you have the watch…In the Navy…[i]f you had the watch, you needed to be awake and alert because you literally had the lives of your shipmates in your hands.”

Here are some of a proven leader’s thoughts on leadership, often book reaction posts from his blog. Rennie had leadership experience in the Navy, in someone else’s business, and then in a business of his own.

It's taken me a while to get this review live, because I had so many reactions while reading this book. I've led a business; I know introverts can do that. I'm not one now; I know I have things to learn from people like Jon Rennie. I've tried not to write a whole other book. While offline, I've read the book three times and written three reviews. This is number three. 

Something you may love: If this had been a full-sized printed book published by Time Warner or Simon & Schuster, an editor might have asked Rennie to expand it with more anecdotes from world history. Since it’s his own book, the author sticks to his own fresh stories. If you don’t want to slog through old familiar discussions of leadership from the days of Sun Tzu and Alexander the Great forward, this book is for you.

Only one of Rennie's thoughts seems controversial, but he’s given me food for thought…about Glyphosate Awareness, and other things. This post is about what you’ll find in I Have the Watch. Glyphosate Awareness may become a whole separate site.

Who should read this book? Anyone up for promotion to a management job, preparation for such promotion by serving as a project team leader, teaching…or activism.

Something I didn’t love: This is one more book from the extrovert planet where nothing is known about how introverts lead and are led.

This post is specifically about the book’s relevance to introverts, because that’s what I have to add to what others have said about it (that it’s a good, short, practical, encouraging explanation of what that promotion means and whether you really want it). Unfortunately I Have the Watch is not addressed to introverts; in fact it’s another book that assumes that extroverts are such a majority that their experience can be considered normative. That belief was based on older studies that evaluated people’s ability to learn social behaviors that were pressed upon them, rather than more recent studies that recognize the invisible, permanent, physical differences in our neurological “wiring.”

We do, of course, have our own set of social instincts. The right ways to lead and to be led are part of that set. Few introverts have consciously studied how leadership works for us. If we want to read about the subject we have to do a lot of translation and, due to discrimination, most of us may have to do some speculative thought.

Attempts were made to get gifted introverts in the baby-boom generation to think about leadership. (In the 1970s the Boy Scouts of America changed the name of their high school division from “Explorers” to “Leadership Corps.”) What many of us thought about it was “It’s hard to soar like an eagle when you have to work with turkeys.” When we’re working for other people, we’re apt to think “Meh…why can’t I just follow? Well, sure, I want higher pay…but this crew of no-talents…”

About that kind of situation Rennie has something useful to say to introverts, inspired by his reading of Susan Cain’s work. As long as we are thinking in terms of “working for other people” who have hired a “crew of no-talents,” to put it charitably, we’re not going to be good leaders, and companies should find other ways to reward our years of service, rather than “promoting” us from the jobs we were doing well into jobs where we’re expected to make up for the shortcomings of all those no-talents. Being a leader requires a certain level of passion for both the job and the people. Introverts may have that level of passion for art, science, religion, nature, or some humanitarian cause; few if any of us have it for causes like helping General Motors sell more Pontiacs or more Chevrolets. Company policies should recognize that we might prefer to be better-paid followers.

So what happens when we do care enough about the cause and the people to be able to lead other people effectively? Whatever it is, it happens slowly and quietly. We prefer to lead and be led more in the style of Jesus, Thoreau, or Gandhi than in the style of Alexander or Napoleon or even W Bush. Our instinct is to focus on tasks, doing things as they ought to be done, and pay more attention to other people only when we notice someone else doing something better than we have been. When we look up and notice people following us, we may instinctively think “Oh, no, they ought to be following some other person,” and sometimes this is right, and sometimes not. In a few cases, things that work when we’re leading fellow introverts can even be the things that cause extroverts to perceive us as bad leaders, even as “jerks.”

Scaling down the emotional tone of conversation, for instance. When Rennie describes the jerkish manager who seems to look away when an employee approaches, feeling that a real leader owes followers some full attention, what comes to my mind is a gifted programmer with whom I worked for part of a year. He and I were in our early twenties. We breezed through the work and sat in our windowless cubicles, separated by a door, bringing in things of our own to do and chatting cheerfully around the door. Both of us were going through a painful emotional process of detachment from male friends who meant more to us than we seemed to have meant to them. We found each other unattractive but not all that repulsive. Face-to-face conversations with lots of eye contact would have become unsuitable-for-work in no time. Conversations around the door stayed at the collegial-banter level. I suspected the programmer would have done better at recognizing the talents of some of our other co-workers if they’d ever learned how and why to converse around a door. And it wouldn't surprise me if, at fifty, he was still his charming, empathetic, approachable self, always willing to walk people through what they didn't understand, when and only when those people talked to him around a door...because every year, for people like him, the lesson sinks in deeper that people who insist on eye contact are prejudiced in any case, and should be treated like enemies.

I, myself, have not always got the “Whyyy are you WITHHOLDING eye contact from me?” whine. Having astigmatism means that I can appear to be making eye contact when I’m not actually seeing any eyes yet; I see clearly, in detail, at all distances but it can take several seconds for my eyes to change focus, so when the face-reader types are passing judgment on whatever they think my eyes are doing, I’m looking in the direction of the voice I hear and seeing a human-size blur. Ears and memory, not eyes, tell me whether a person who pops into my field of vision and starts talking is a friend or stranger, male or female, adult or child. And if I look at other people’s faces until I see them clearly, the owners of those faces are likely to feel stared at. I’m not a very large or aggressive person but I do have beetling brows, craggy cheekbones, and broad shoulders, a typical Cherokee combination that tends to intimidate some White people. I get accused of looming and towering over people (at least two of whom were taller than I), burning holes in them with my eyes, staring, glaring…when what I’m actually doing is waiting for their faces to come into focus. Most of my close friends have been, not blind, but visually impaired in some way, such that they listened, rather than trying to read faces, during conversations. In any kind of teaching or management situation my conscious effort would be to avoid setting off the string of emotions that go with the perception that a teacher or manager is staring, glaring, etc. Withholding eye contact is another fairly typical introvert behavior on Rennie’s list of behaviors typical of “jerks.” And it's another stupid snap judgment extroverts should be telling one another to stop making...like Hillary Clinton, I've caught a fair bit of hate just because, although I've not had to pay for specially made glasses so far, I happen to have a minority type of eyeballs. (In males, genetic studies have linked this to a talent for math. In females the link seems to have broken.)

Some introverts positively work to avoid being promoted to management positions. This tends to frustrate corporate managers. If people don’t want to be managers, what do they want?

Other introverts become “accidental managers.” We didn’t need much managing, so we didn’t learn how to manage people who do. Typically we just continue to focus on our own jobs, “lead” entirely by example, and to some extent justify the claim that we’re not good managers and should not have been promoted.

Rennie hints at one of the alternatives some introverts might prefer: “more respect.” Typically introverts define respect as leaving other people alone, pride ourselves on giving others as much of that kind of respect as we’d want to get from them, and are perceived as uninterested in those others. (Of course, every time we’re told how alien we are to some other people, we disengage from those people and lose interest in them more and more, because obviously they just don’t understand and, if we wanted to waste our time talking to creatures that didn’t understand, we could just adopt pet rocks.) From the viewpoint of motivational psychology, of course, I’d have to say: just accept it and get on with it. We like doors that lock from the inside. Install them. We like uninterrupted work time to focus completely on a task, followed by decompression time like a two-hour lunch break in the park. Work with that. We like flex time. Thank us for that (it’s called “being the selfless heroes of traffic safety”). Yes, we know it hurts your feelings to admit that the thing you can do that would please us best is to get out of our sight. Yes, you’ll survive.

Introvert personalities are not actually shaped by a primary desire to avoid all other people—only to avoid extroverts. We find it much easier to coexist with one another, at least when we’ve given up trying to be or pass for extroverts. For many of us, what makes the company of extroverts so tiresome is that everything they do and say is one big show of lack of a healthy respect for others. Sometimes introverts think we want to be managers because we think that job title communicates respect. Lacking insight into what people who need to be managed want, need, or expect from managers, however, can make it easy for us to be bad managers who are resented more than respected. In a word, jerks.

Rennie recommends more respect for employees, generally, as a motivator just to work. He’s right about the benefit of respect for employees but, once again, he’s writing from the extrovert planet. Really, if these people’s brains had developed completely they’d know that we show respect by, e.g., speaking only when we have something to say (no “greetings” without conversations), avoiding interruptions, never touching people, never looking at any part of anyone’s body but the eyes and never prolonging eye contact. When people with healthy consciences are learning new jobs, we expect a supervisor to be close by to answer every question and make sure we’re learning to do the jobs right, which shows due respect for the jobs; once we’ve learned our jobs, we expect not to be noticeably supervised at all, which shows respect for our healthy consciences.

Extroverts tend to be attracted to the idea of a social hierarchy where “getting away with” disrespect shows that they’re at the top, therefore respectable and interesting people. Introverts tend to be underwhelmed by such displays. We’re attracted to people who show how respectful they can be. An introvert’s display of respect for someone as a human being may be misread by extroverts as a submissive display that should be answered with a dominance display. They’re so wrong. Our instinctive feeling about the diss-as-dominance-display is that it represents vanity, which should be pulled down. A little fault-finding, failure to listen, calling people by the wrong names, etc., costs the extrovert manager any honest respect we might have felt for his different talents. Those behaviors are field marks for turkeys.

Possibly the best-case scenario occurs when several like-minded introverts happen to be interested in the same thing at the same time. It can be interesting to try to identify a leader in these groups. Very large gaps in age, education, achievement, or ability may qualify someone for special treatment, or any noticeable leadership position in the group may be task-specific and rotate as different people’s suggestions are followed. Dominance displays, even subtle ones like “Only some of the offices have windows and only senior managers qualify for those offices,” generally express hostility and contempt among introverts so they aren’t used by introverts who want the respect of our peers. Introverts usually don’t bother demeaning ourselves by asking for better office space. We just disengage. If nicer work spaces are reserved for turkeys who kiss up to somebody’s sick ego, we’re only serving time while we look for nicer jobs or save money to launch our own ventures. If companies want more “employee engagement,” one good idea might be to restructure everyone’s job so that working from home (no cameras, no time-watching software) becomes normal and ample interpersonal space becomes available for everybody.

About those introverts who walk away from corporations and do their own things, well enough that they then hire help…one person’s bad boss or jerk may be another person’s great leader. Some people I remember as great bosses, real leaders, and dear friends, others have described as “difficult” or “no, not difficult, impossible to work with.” Not sharing their talents, but sharing their task focus and self-starting qualities, I found them delightful to work with. So what if they tended to forget that what they did was more difficult for most people than it was for them, and that most people did not inherit the math gene. I think it might have been good for at least two men’s characters if more co-workers and employees had been able to quote at them, “Talents differ: all is well and wisely put. If I cannot carry forests on my back, neither can you crack a nut.” I did that but I learned useful skills from them and even caught some of their enthusiasm for their jobs.

Not all people of good will and superior talent are good at hand-holding. Possibly, as awareness of introversion as a valuable permanent trait grows, more people will be recognizable as excellent leaders for self-starters only.

People who want to lead large (or fast-growing) companies may want the benefits of employing a diverse group. They are the ones who most need to study leadership as a separate topic. It would be helpful if the material available for them to study avoided repeating the hateful value judgments that are so tediously familiar to introverts, and that tend to cause us to tune out and disengage. What does it say about our society that the word that people with talents for computer technology reclaimed for themselves was “geeks”? Some “geeks” can afford a little self-deprecating humor to the tune of “more than a hundred thousand a year,” but even they may want to study and practice how to encourage people who don’t look forward to being left alone with their in-boxes all day. Rennie offers checklists that could be both more objective and more detailed, but they’ll do for a start.

Identifying employee disengagement as a drain on corporate America, Rennie goes so far as to say that businesses can afford to think of “putting employees ahead of customers.” The cognitive dissonance here may be semantic since his idea is that, if employers “put employees ahead of customers,” the employees are all mentally sound people of good will and will instinctively want and know how to “take care of customers.” That may even work for the Navy or for companies that build big expensive machines they sell to corporations. People in those workplaces don’t spend much time with customers. The Navy doesn’t even have customers in the ordinary sense of the word: taxpayers don’t pop into the Navy store for a pound of security. In ordinary stores and restaurants, I see entirely too many employees who seem to have heard that they can or should be “put ahead of customers.” I don’t think they’ve been done any favor. “I don’t feel like thanking people when they give me money, because I have a hangover” is the identifying call of an employee who needs to spend a few months at home, unemployed, ineligible for unemployment insurance, and with a bad reference, until person feels better adjusted to the reality of being an employee.

An employee whose ability to thank people upon taking their payments depends on the employee’s sick emotional feelings is, indeed, a liability to the company. Possibly the employee's feelings come from discouragement or disengagement. Probably it will help for managers to consider some of the other ways they cut off the first little tendrils of engagement with a job, systematically, as they form.

One example: People under 30 are, for all practical purposes, kids. People under 25 are still growing for pity’s sake. And they tend to be all wrapped up in their shiny new adolescent self-consciousness, and their obsessive mating-and-nesting urges are so burdensome to everyone around them that some of the world’s biggest employers have historically required employees to take vows of celibacy. Still, even at 17, they see what’s going on when adults are encouraged to “retire” during what may be their most productive years. On paper 50-year-old women automatically gain only 20 to 30 percent more productive work time, but in practice they may be more than 50 percent more productive than 25-year-old women are. Re-TIRE-ment? But we’re not tired. We have the use of all the energy our bodies wasted for years on those stupid hormone cycles. Some 50-year-olds, male or female, do want to “retire” from working for other people and be self-employed entrepreneurs; others are more valuable assets than younger employees, even if the young work cheaper. “Mandatory retirement” is a tip-off to Bright Young Things not to plan on careers with that kind of company, to disengage and start planning their own “retirement” from that company before they’re even 30.

A related example would be any concern with “looks” or “grooming.” Much progress has been made during my lifetime but I was still perturbed to read of employers using Zoom technology to criticize the way young women paint their faces, or don’t, when working at home. Climate, skin type, and the kind of attention a woman gets determine whether she paints on protection from the harsh wind or lets her bare skin breathe. If her employer even notices that, she may be a courtesan selling her hormonal “sizzle” rather than a prostitute forced to sell her physical “steak,” but she is a sex worker: the way men's hormones react to her matters more than the job she's doing does. Women don’t go to university in order to be sex workers so the mere idea of a supervisor noticing a woman’s “makeup,” or lack thereof, is a valid reason for permanent and total disengagement. 

A different related example would be the practice of promoting younger workers ahead of once-loyal senior employees. At the same time that respect for young people’s intelligence and morality seems to be a problem, promoting “Joe College” ahead of the people who know how to do the job is a de-motivator for the senior employees as  well as Joe College. I used to know a lady who went to work in a factory in the 1940s and stayed into the 1970s. She had trained several younger workers until the day she encouraged a 23-year-old, “When you learn how to do this you’ll be qualified to do my job,” and the young man beamed, “Oh I don’t want to do your job, Mabel, I want to be your boss!”…“And by the time he was 25 they probably would have made him my boss. Just because he had a degree in engineering instead of elementary education. Not that what my boss did was engineering, any more than what I did was elementary education. So I quit,” said Mabel.

Then there are the cultural conflicts that give the modern urban office its exciting cosmopolitan flavor. Most Anglo-Americans have heard something about looking at their own shoes and backing away being ways people show respect in some cultures, and standing too close and even cheek kissing being ways they show heterosexual same-sex friendliness. Most have not heard that, to Highly Sensory-Perceptive introverts, a forced smile is a hideous thing to see, and extroverts who’ve been in the habit of telling themselves to force a smile need at least to identify people they know who would dislike them much less if they let their faces relax. (You can’t force your eyes to smile, and if your eyes aren’t smiling, baring your teeth is a threat display.) Or that, for most introverts, corporate “fun” events are of two kinds: the ones that are tolerable if they don’t impinge on our family time, and the ones that positively motivate us to quit jobs. Recognizing these things as culturally ingrained behaviors that we can at least learn to “read” and predict accurately in relationships with individuals can make it possible at least to talk rationally about them without writing each other off as jerks, turkeys, etc.

These matters are not discussed in depth in I Have the Watch, possibly because fixing them may not be an option available to every office “team leader.” Let’s just say that I was favorably enough impressed with I Have the Watch that I’d be interested in reading Rennie’s new book to see whether he talks about them there. What he has to say about respecting and encouraging employees will probably leave you, too, wanting to think, read, and try more.

So, the good news is that there is more. The new book is called All in the Same Boat and it's available from Amazon or from jonsrennie.com. Audible (digital recordings) versions of both books are available, too.