On Monday, I was on the way to a meeting in Wisconsin with a member of my team when he realized that we were going to be passing through the hometown of his grandmother. So, we made a quick stop on the way, and the happiness that could be created by spending an unplanned hour with an 83 year old woman was priceless. It was a nice precursor to the visit that I will get to make at my grandfather's home in Massachusetts on Saturday.

The detour also made me appreciate the close-knit sales and marketing team that I had the opportunity to build during the past three and a half years. After all, how many people would ask their boss to visit their grandmother with them? A lot of people extend the advice that a manager, coach or parent should keep an arm's length away from the people for whom he/she is responsible, and I have grown to disagree with that philosophy. For three years, I was a fraternity advisor at Stanford University, and I felt like the distance I maintained caused me to miss the opportunity to truly connect with the men whom I was supposed to mentor. I didn't communicate or invest as much time as many of the other mentors I knew at other universities and my friendships with those undergraduates fizzled quickly upon their graduation. Thus, I vowed to make an extra effort with the next team I would have the opportunity to lead.

The next three and a half years were incredible. Each member of my team was in a different geographical location, yet I really got to know them and their spouses, children and parents. I introduced them to my wife, attended their weddings, flew to one’s family reunion, and made sure to talk to them about both their professional and non-professional goals. Transparency was an important facet of our relationships as well. Everyone knew where I stood on every issue and they were open with me, too. The trust that we built made for an extraordinary working environment. When recruiters would call to tell me about other opportunities (when the economy was better), I would ultimately tell them that I simply wasn't interested in abandoning my team.

Many people think that such an open leadership style can cause a team to become lackadaisical and unproductive. I disagree. A team can lose focus for many reasons, but with the best people, the right resources, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, a positive culture and solid competitive positioning, the manager of the team should be more of a servant leader than a taskmaster. Take away those success factors, and no amount of “management” could have a lasting impact on a limping team. Thus, the leader of the team should focus less on applying pressure and more on investing his/her energies on setting a winning strategy and clearing bottlenecks for everyone.  After all, in the right environment, the team will be self-motivated to reach as high as it can, with some vision and coaching from its leader.

So, as I reflect on these past three and a half years, I am grateful for the cohesive team that was built on a foundation of trust and transparency. I’m looking forward to replicating the same model again throughout my career.