• by Tom Hespos , October 28, 2002

I was dressed in the only business suit I owned at the time. Waiting patiently outside my godfather’s office, I was thinking about this defining moment in my career. I had just secured my first real job after college, a position as an administrative assistant at Young & Rubicam. Before I started, I wanted to get some advice from someone who had been around the block – someone who knew the New York City business community and could offer up some tips to a kid who couldn’t even figure out the NYC subway system, much less distinguish himself in an entry-level position.

My father had suggested I talk to my godfather, Arthur Mirante, who was the CEO of Cushman & Wakefield, arguably the largest commercial real estate company on the face of the planet. I had known Arthur all my life. He had helped my parents when they were in the process of adopting me. While I was an infant and Arthur was a practicing lawyer, he had represented my parents in the adoption proceedings. He was my dad’s best friend while they were growing up, and he had been there for me as I was growing up, too. Why, then, was I so nervous sitting outside his office?

Arthur has a great talent for making people feel at ease, so when he finally emerged from his office and brought me inside, the butterflies went away. We sat down and talked about all sorts of things – my expectations for the position I was about to take, where I saw myself in a few years, and some basic business philosophy. He gave me a book, Why Smart People Do Dumb Things, and warned me about personal pride issues standing in the way of getting the job done. But his most valuable piece of advice was delivered in a single sentence, one I’ve carried with me since that day in 1994.

“Tom,” Arthur said to me that day, “you need to train the people you work for to be able to do without you.”

“Why would I do that?” I asked. “If they don’t need me, won’t they cut me loose?”

“No,” he said. “They’ll look for more challenging things for you to do.”

I thought about that advice for a long time. At first glance, it didn’t appear to make sense to me, but it has since become a basic tenet of my own business philosophy.

The first few months of the job at Y&R were challenging. I supported the media team on the U.S. Army account. Deck writing, proofing and sending letters from the media supervisors, copying, collating, filling out expense reports – I pretty much lived the life of a glorified secretary. Slowly but surely, I began to train the people I was working for. I helped them become better versed in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. I attended agency seminars and reported back on their contents, especially when the seminars had to do with this new thing called the World Wide Web that everyone seemed to be getting excited about. I developed processes for automating quantitative analysis of the print publications we were considering for our media plan. Basically, I tried to do my best to help the media group be able to handle all of the stuff I was doing for them on their own.

It paid off. Within a short period of time, the media director on the account asked me to help him with an important project – the recommendation for the U.S. Army recruiting website. And that’s how I got into interactive communications.

Since then, my godfather’s advice has continued to serve me well. I realized that his few words were really a summation of a much greater philosophy that has individual empowerment at its core. When I became an agency vice president at K2 Design a few years later, I discovered that “training people to do without you” worked in a number of different ways.

Our media group at K2 met weekly to discuss status on all the projects we were working on. I asked each member of the group to bring news and opinion articles with them each week that had to do with the interactive industry. Each group member had to present the article and discuss the issues and ramifications for the industry. In this way, we stayed on top of the issues that affected our industry and, hence, our media recommendations.

I also put together a small website that divided the interactive communications business into its core sectors and provided links to the most important news articles, opinion pieces and key vendors in each of those sectors. That site became OLAF – the On Line Advertising Forum. But that is a another story for another day.

On my computer’s hard drive, I have hundreds upon hundreds of PowerPoint slides that cover various industry topics, from search engine optimization to ad servers to building your own CRM initiative. At various points in my career, these slides have been covered at various training sessions I’ve put on for people working with me at the various ad agencies. I’ve even taken some of these training pieces to other organizations.

Empowerment of the people working around you is key to success. In order to succeed, we have to resist the urge to hold on to intellectual capital. It needs to be shared. Rather than protecting knowledge in an effort to become valuable enough to an organization to keep one’s job, we have to share it. The smart organizations will reward someone who can train people to be able to handle his job. And they certainly will look for more challenging things for that individual to take charge of.

I have my godfather to thank for the advice he gave me that allowed me to get into this great field in the first place. But more importantly, I have him to thank for changing my perspective. Sharing knowledge doesn’t devalue the person doing the sharing. It increases his value by providing for a stronger and deeper department, by showing management a growing knowledge and experience base, and by increasing the overall value of the organization.

Thank you, Arthur.