Using Lydia’s Rule To Leverage Your Time And Effort

10 Jun, 2010  influence, management, motivation


My favorite manager of all time had a simple philosophy I now call Lydia’s Rule. As much as I would like to write a book about it, I don’t think I could find a publisher interested in a book consisting of a single sentence.

Lydia’s rule is as follows:

You make me look good, and I’ll make you look good.

That was it. Her rule was as brilliant as it was simple.

She repeated it often, and I bent over backwards to make Lydia look good. And she kept her end of the bargain as well—even inviting me to attend regular meetings with the top brass at the time, Michael Dell and Tom Meredith.

I have lost touch with Lydia over the years (please put her in touch with me if you know her), but her simple, but powerful philosophy lives on in my classroom and benefits those I currently manage.

You will never find Lydia’s Rule on Amazon or the pages of the Harvard Business Review. But if you want others to enthusiastically leverage your time and effort, I recommend it highly. It works.

Photo credit–despair.com

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  • http://www.talentculture.com/founder/ Meghan M. Biro

    Great thoughts John. I suppose the universal laws of reciprocity play a large role after all. Simple concept yet it still escapes many people. Let’s find Lydia!

  • http://myflexiblepencil.com David M. Kasprzak

    A great thought, John,

    I’d love to see a world where the statement was inverted, however: “I’ll make you look good, and that will make me look good.”

    If the role of leaders in organizations is to mentor, coach, and develop their people, then they should be rewarded for doing so. The individual employee has to work hard and well, of course, but they also need the environment that makes achievement possible. Otherwise, no amount of effort will make anyone look good at all since the system surrounding all of them isn’t designed for success anyway.

  • http://www.despair.com Lawrence Kersten

    It’s interesting that you chose Motivation as the Demotivator® that best illustrates Lydia’s Rule. A cynic may have chosen Flattery http://www.despair.com/flattery.html ;-) .

    I think you underestimate the publishing potential of Lydia’s Rule. As stated and illustrated above, it strikes me as being a potent and useful exemplar of Vroom’s Expectancy Theory. Along that line, it’s interesting to consider what happens when the expectancies get out of whack. Assuming a leader wanted to apply Lydia’s Rule at work, what happens when:

    1. The employee loses confidence in the boss’s intentions; i.e. the employee comes to believe that the real, unspoken rule is “You make me look good, and I’ll make me look good.” If the employee has a significantly shorter time horizon that the boss, this seems likely.

    2. The leader fails in his/her role in the company. I wrote about this briefly for the Conference Board Review, referring to the problem as the Failed Leader Fallout. http://www.tcbreview.com/rules-of-engagement-sum09.php.

    3. The leader doesn’t have the “juice” to make the employee look good; i.e. doesn’t fail but still doesn’t have the stature to make a difference. I also wrote about this in the above mentioned article, referring to it as The Catch-22.

    4. The employee doesn’t want attention from the senior leadership; i.e. there’s enough toxicity and capriciousness in the workplace that they’d rather stay out of the line of fire.

    The list could be much longer with some thought, but I bet you could develop Lydia’s Rule into an engaging business book.

    Lawrence Kersten, Co-Founder of Despair, Inc.

  • John W. Burrows, Ph.D.

    Thanks for the thoughtful comment. It looks like I may have found a co-author!

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