Positively Leverage Career Challenges

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick. And welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today we're delighted to be speaking with Sergeant Major Matthew R. Drayton. He grew up in an underprivileged neighborhood in Georgia. He spent 20 years–little more than 20 years actually–in the US Army, 16 of those working with the elite special operations forces. That has been employed by commercial businesses, academic institutions, law enforcement and other government agencies.

He has also served as an executive director and board member of multiple youth nonprofit organizations. He is the founder of Drayton Communications, where he shares his life story, which was quite amazing having read your book. He is a contributor to Newsweek and has been featured on HuffPost and the Los Angeles Times. And is the author of two books.The first book is Succeeding While Black and the second is Leading While Black. So, Matt, thank you again for writing the book. Let's start off with a question, because I think sometimes people think of these two things as the same. And I'm curious, what do you view as the difference between a setback and defeat?

Matthew R. Drayton: For me, a setback is a temporary derailment of an action or something. For example, if I am trying to finish a project and 5 or 6 people call in sick, then that's a temporary derailment. But I'm still going to finish that project. A defeat to me is just total failure and complete failure of that project. So you cannot finish it. You cannot complete it for whatever reason. When I look at setbacks versus defeat, we probably have more setbacks in life over the long span than we do defeat. A lot of times when things happen, we may look at it as being a defeat. In a lot of ways, it's usually a setback, you know, something that we can overcome if we just remain calm and try to solve the issue or work through the issue. Make sense?

Anita Brick: Yeah it does. Here's a question from a Booth student. And she said: “I'm currently struggling with what feels like an overwhelming challenge in my career. Can you please share a few things about how you turned around a challenge at a time in your career, and that you turned it actually into something that is beneficial?”

Matthew R. Drayton: Well, Anita, one thing I will tell you with all my government experience and working in the military, I experienced a lot of challenges and I've had multiple throughout my career. One of the things that I try to do whenever I'm challenged is I try to look at myself. That's the first thing I do. Am I at fault in any way for the challenge I'm having? It's little things that we do ourselves that cause these challenges. Listen, self-assessment is probably one of the hardest things to do. But a lot of times it may be something small that we're doing, something small that we are allowing that causes these challenges to happen.

You know, when I was in the military, I'll tell you a story about something that I had happen. I was appointed to a job one time. I had some coworkers that I could tell they didn't feel that I belong there. And I could tell that they didn't want me there or didn't feel like I had earned my position to be there. So we had this one project we were working on, and it was a pretty big project. Unbeknownst to me, a couple of my coworkers signed me up for a major part of that project. A big slice of it that I was unaware I was being signed up for. And when this was announced, it was announced in front of the entire team.

So I was in a position where I could do 1 or 2 things. I could step up and say, hey, I wasn't told about this. I'm not ready for this. Or I could keep my mouth shut and accept the challenge and try to work through it. I decided to do the latter because even though I was blindsided, I felt that if I had stood up in front of the group and said that, it would have been more detrimental to me than it would have been to the people who had blindsided me.

What I did is I just worked extra hard. I had to work extremely long hours. I was working nights. I was coming in early in the morning. I can happily say I was able to overcome the blindside. I was able to overcome not being brought in early enough and everything to be very, very successful with that project. And that's one of the things that I try to tell people. Whenever there's a challenge facing you, you're going to have to put in some extra time to solve it. You're going to have to work harder, maybe longer hours, or if it's a personal life challenge, you're going to probably have to put some extra effort into it because that's just the way it's going to be for you.

Anita Brick: The follow-on question to that is, if you look back now, how did that kind of being thrown under the bus, how did that benefit you both in the short and long term?

Matthew R. Drayton: In the short term, it benefited me because it made me aware of my surroundings. In the short term. When that happened, that was a wake up call, that was a realization that, hey, you need to be very aware of everything that's going on around you. You need to put in a little bit of extra effort to keep your ears to the ground for things that may pop up, reading the tea leaves, as you will.

So in the short term. In the long term, what it did for me was from a leadership perspective, it made me appreciate honesty and decency in the workplace, and it taught me how to deal with this type of thing if I saw it happening under my leadership, as well as how to prevent this type of thing from happening under my leadership. Every setback or challenge that we have will provide you some type of leadership lesson or personal lesson that you can carry forward to help you down the road or even immediately.

Anita Brick: Well, it's interesting because when you think about it, there was another MBA student who asked: “how do you transform a situation when you're not in charge?” But clearly you weren't in charge, but you took full responsibility and you owned it and then went from there. How did you avoid becoming resentful, which clearly can take away so much energy and focus, even if you want it in your heart to blame others? How did you own it and move forward rather than becoming resentful?

Matthew R. Drayton: One of the great things about the military, Anita, is we are well trained. We go through a lot of training that teach us different things. One of the leadership schools I went to in the military, we had a PhD come in, she was a female, and I'll never forget her. This lady talked about just stress management and how remaining calm and how being positive would help you with your career and in leadership. To this day, when I–and this was years ago–but to this day, whenever I am confronted with any kind of situation like that, I think back to the lessons that she taught. But the primary thing she talked about was when you're faced with a situation like I was, you stop and you say, hey, what would a calm person do?

And I will tell you I use that to this day. Anytime I'm getting flustered or I've got some outside influence, which by the way most of the challenges we get, a lot of them are not internal, a lot of them are caused by other people. Most of them are. And a lot of times we're not prepared for them. So hey, what would a calm person do? So I just internalized what had happened. And then, you know, I'll tell you this too. And this is maybe a little sadistic of me, but I kind of get joy when they try something like that and it doesn't work. So the look on these guys' faces, you know, because I'll never forget standing up–I was briefing a large group on how this project was going to go down. And these two guys who did this were sitting in the front row. There was disappointment on their face because I was hitting all the marks in this briefing and everyone in the briefing was attentive. One of the ways to gauge how successful you are at briefing or email correspondence or any type of instruction that you're putting out is the amount of questions you get back. You don't get a lot of questions back and that means what you said was clear and understandable, and everybody knows what to do.

Anita Brick: It's very important but not everybody has that wherewithal. And there are questions of people who have carryover from previous experiences that kind of damaged them. First, an alum, and he said: “I made a mistake early in my career that got me fired for cause. Well, I have done many things successfully since then. Whenever someone calls me in for feedback, my first reaction is, here we go again. What advice would you have to help me give less credence to my negative default?”

Matthew R. Drayton: The advice I would give that alum is this. The fact that he has done many things successfully since then tells me that they have moved on, that they have become a better person. One of the things we kind of do as human beings, we have a tendency to beat ourselves up over mistakes we've made, and it's hard for us to move on. But the fact that this person has done positive things since tells me that they have made progress. I think the negative default is there because of the fact that they made a mistake, and they don't want to let that mistake go. But don't allow an early mistake to control your career.

And the other side of this too, that I picked up on with that question was the feedback part. Whenever you get called into an office, it's not necessarily always going to be negative feedback. And then the other thing I would say is embrace all feedback, the positive and the negative. Because when someone gives you negative feedback, they're not giving it to you to hurt you or belittle you. They're giving it to you to make you better. I would appreciate someone giving me negative feedback more than I would them not telling me I'm making a mistake at all.

As a leader and especially during my military career, there were many, many times where I had to give people feedback. There was one young lady, she was very, very loud in the workplace. You could hear her down the hallway. And sometimes her language in conversations was inappropriate. Now, this young lady didn't work directly for me. However, nobody said anything. This went on for a while. So one day I called her into my office and I sat her down and I said, hey, listen, here's some things that I see that you really need to work on and look out for. She was so hot with me. She got up and stormed out of my office. About 4:00 that afternoon, that young lady called me and she said, hey, listen, I was really upset when I stormed out of your office, she said, after I got to thinking about it, nobody told me that I was doing these things. And she said, you're the only person that said anything to me about it. I ran into her several years later when I became a DoD civilian. We're still friends to this day. We follow each other on social media, things like that.

So all feedback is good feedback. For this person who got fired for cause early on in their career, when you get called in, look at that as a chance to get better, look at that as a chance to improve, not as something negative. And please don't beat yourself up over a mistake you made years ago, especially now that you're thriving and are doing things very well.Anita Brick: Okay, good. All right. So here's another situation from earlier in their life. And this is an MBA student. And he said: “I grew up in a very poor village in India. While we lived in poverty my family was loving and supportive. I have gone on to attend university in India and now I'm completing my MBA at Chicago. But still I carry a bit of the poor child I was and don't always feel that I deserve a seat at the leadership table. What are a few things that you would advise someone like me to do to begin to overcome this?”

Matthew R. Drayton: So the first thing I would tell this person is to number one, realize that you belong. If you are now in an MBA program which clearly states that you have talent and leadership capability and ability and is now on the path to be a future leader, then know that you belong. Number one.

I'll tell you a quick story. Being a young black noncommissioned officer in special operations, there were not very many of us there. So a lot of times when I was at different meetings or I would go to conferences both here and abroad, a lot of times I’d be the only black person in the room. And sometimes you look up and you see people looking at you, and it can be a little bit intimidating. We all struggle with self-esteem issues. We all struggle with feeling like we belong. But one of the things that I have found that really helps with belonging and being a part of a group, is becoming as smart as you can on your subject matter. Making yourself a subject matter expert. Sounds like it has nothing to do with fitting in, but one of the things I have found throughout my career, even when people probably didn't want to accept me on a social level, they would accept the fact that I brought value to the team, and that is very important in leadership and in business.

I'll just be honest. There will be people who will not like you because of who you are or what you look like. And this doesn't necessarily mean, you know, Indian or Black or anything else. That's just human nature for people to kind of gravitate towards certain people and away from others. But if you are a valuable member of the team, if you are a subject matter expert, if you bring something to the table, people will embrace you. And if they don't embrace you and maybe they won't embrace you, but people will respect you. To me, respect is more important than sometimes than sitting in, and sometimes than being friends with people. We're not going to be friends with everybody. Have confidence, have good energy, and people will feed off that.

Anita Brick: I agree with you. And I think in the moment, especially when someone is trying to get to that next level of leadership and be taken seriously, it can be very challenging. And there is an alum, she said: “ I know that I am capable and feel that I'm discounted, not just because of the color of my skin, but also because of my gender. How have you seen others leverage these two aspects of me – my color and my gender – to actually have greater career success and even make it into the executive ranks?”

Matthew R. Drayton: So I identify with this alum as a minority. I will tell you, as a minority in the workplace, especially in leadership position and especially in the corporate world, sometimes the higher up you go, the lonelier it gets. That's unfortunate, but that's sometimes the way it is. There are still a lot of people that don't believe, even here in 2022, that don't believe that minorities and women and others belong in some of these leadership positions. So it's hard.

I will say the same thing that I said for the MBA student that was struggling with fitting in. You have to almost outwork everyone you're working with when you're a minority. And that's unfortunate. I have personally witnessed where I was doubling the output of one of my peers, and that peer was looked at more favorably, got more opportunities for advancement and everything else. These things are real. These things happen. The way we handle them and the way we deal with them will define us. For this person, and again I go back to what I said earlier. Look at yourself first, because when you talk about being discounted, is there a reason that I am causing myself to be discounted? Am I engaged? Am I positive? Ask yourself these questions. Always look inward first. Is there something I can do that can better this situation? Because we control what we can do? A lot of things we can't control outside how people treat us sometimes.

I would tell her to work hard, outwork everybody and just understand that things will be different for you in the corporate world, especially in senior management. But don't be discouraged. I said this earlier: if you provide value to the team, if you bring something to the table, it is very hard to be discounted. You have to understand that because someone is treating you a certain way, doesn't mean there's something wrong with you that is probably the most important thing.

One thing about it in the workplace, people can be mean. People can do things, little things that annoy us. But it is very hard for any leader to ignore competence and productivity. If you have those things going for you and you continue to work hard, I would say more favorably be able to overcome some of the feelings you have in the workplace about being discounted.

Anita Brick: Well, you clearly have done that. You've risen to the occasion. Another question from another alum. It makes me sad, at the least, that this question is even a question these days. But here we go. And he said: “I can see how others watch my behavior when I have an obstacle at work, especially as I perceived it as a form of systemic discrimination. How have you not just won in a situation for yourself, but how has your victory inspired others to do the same?”

Matthew R. Drayton: Anita, so this question so I remember this one and wondering specifically when he talked about he's perceived it as a form of systemic discrimination. Clearly there's probably something going on in his workplace. Not being there, but I will answer the question and respect how this person feels. And having gone through this myself as a black man, having to deal with it my entire life, I understand it. One thing I want to say though, I don't like to look at overcoming obstacles as winning or losing them. I don't think that's a good way to look at it. You know, I try to set a positive example for young people to follow.

What I've learned over time is this. And this person has to understand, this is if these people have a problem with you based on what you look like, they're very likely not going to change. However, what you can do is control how you handle these people dealing with you. What I mean by that is the things you control are showing up on time, working hard, being positive, not letting these people get to you. Because a lot of times when people are doing this, they're trying to get you to do something to put your career in jeopardy. If it's so toxic and you've exhausted all of the human resources channels to resolve issues, then it's always okay to go ahead and look for other employment. I highly recommend that if you're working in a toxic environment.

For that particular job that he is on, that organization he is with, is I would just tell him or her to control what you can, don't let other people control you and control how you deal with them. And the other thing too, don't don't let people bait you into doing something that will hurt your career. Don't allow that. It takes so much energy to do this stuff. Recognize this as well. As an African-American, as a minority, as a female, you're going to be watched. There will be a different level of scrutiny put on you in the workplace, unfortunately. That's just the way it is. That's the way it has been. So acknowledge that and just do the best you can, work as hard as you can, and try to as best you can to ignore them.

Anita Brick: There's a lot of variability in terms of corporate cultures, and I think your point is really well taken, certainly not allow anyone to bait you. Do your best while you're there. And also, I think you gave us all permission that sometimes you don't want to tolerate those toxic environments and you move on. Matt, I was thinking about this. I know you shared a lot of things in your book–and I could tell you put your whole heart and soul into it. And throughout it all you had a very strong focus on who you wanted to be. And I feel that that was a guiding force for you to achieve all that you've achieved. And so I'm glad that you shared all that with us.

What are three things that you would advise someone to do if they're in the midst of a challenge, for whatever the reason of that challenge, so that they can move through it and transform it and actually leverage it for their career?

Matthew R. Drayton: The first thing, I'll go back to it. And I know I've said this before, but I think it's extremely important, Anita, is look inward. Look at yourself. A lot of times when a challenge arises, it could be something we can control or something we can do differently to alleviate that problem or challenge. And that is the easiest thing to do. If you look at yourself and say, okay, here's what's going on, I am going to try a couple of different things and see if I can resolve this myself. That's number one. So if you look at yourself and then you have eliminated that, hey, yeah, I'm not culpable in this problem or challenge in any way. It is clearly coming from outside sources. Then you move on.

Number two is when a challenge or a problem arises, immediately start thinking about solutions. Don't pity yourself. Don't feel like a victim. Start looking at solutions. And this can be in your personal life or this could be for a project at work. When a problem arises, you have to immediately acknowledge it and start looking for solutions for it. Challenges don't get better if we ignore them. Nothing does. That would be number two.

And number three. One of the things that I didn't get to, but I want to talk about real quick, you got to look at how much of the problem or challenge you're having has anything to do with change. And what I mean is what has changed to cause you an issue is, or is there some change in your life or change in your work that is causing this problem? Because a lot of times change contributes to a lot of the challenges we have. You know, everything's going great, everything's going smooth, you know, and then you get a new boss and then he says, hey, I don't like anything you've been doing. You've been a rockstar at work. And then all of a sudden now you got somebody new in, doesn't like the way things are going, doesn't like anything you're doing. That is hard. Guess what? We have to adapt to our bosses. They don't have to adapt to us. We need to look at change in a positive way. I think we need to look at it as something that's inevitable.

I think we need to never, ever get too comfortable with anything. A lot of times, and I've been on guard and I've worked in organizations where you see people just you could just tell they're way too comfortable, they're way too cocky, too overconfident, and then things start to change and they can't handle it. They can’t deal with change. They can't deal with negative feedback.

So I think those are three of the things that are very important. One of the things I'll mention, I always talk about this. So there's a book out by Spencer Johnson called Who Moved My Cheese? like 100 pages or something. It's just a very small book. It is about change. It's all about change. Change is one of the big things that causes us a lot of issues. So I wanted to get that in before we finish today.

Anita Brick: I'll be very honest. I love change and I hate the idea of change. So when someone says, oh, this is going to change and like well I want that to change. But I like to have change and variety. So I think what you said is incredibly important. And it's a great book, by the way, that you recommended.

And you should know this even better than I would. But I worked for the startup and we were on a helicopter flight. I was just resisting every time it would move, and I was feeling worse and worse and worse. And the CEO came to me and he said, or he turned to me and said, you've got to go with it. And sometimes being aware of change and using it as momentum forward, I think you've done that time and again. Don't you think?

Matthew R. Drayton: I have, sometimes reluctantly, but again, now, that book I just told you about, Who Moved My Cheese?, I read that years ago. Somebody recommended it to me, probably because they saw I was struggling with change. I read that and I said, man, you know, this is a novel concept, but it's great. I mean, now I get it. I can't control things. The military really helped me deal with change a lot because it changes there all the time. But it changes a lot in the corporate world too, especially today with all the technology that we have anAd all the different ways that we communicate.

So yeah, change is very important. I think, for your listeners, that is a great place to focus your energy on being more adaptable to. That and then, of course, you know, looking inward, self-assessment is hard to do. An honest self-assessment is even harder to do. But I try to do that daily. Continue to improve, continue to work on yourself, continue to assess yourself, and above all else, make sure that you become adaptable to change because change doesn't wait for us.

Anita Brick: Well, yeah. And if we aren't, then the obstacles get bigger. Matt, thank you so, so much. Thank you for writing the book and your flexibility today with our having this conversation. I am just so glad that we had the opportunity to have this conversation.

Matthew R. Drayton: Well, Anita, thank you for having me. I enjoyed speaking with you and I hope that I said something today that will help your listeners.

Anita Brick: Well, more than just one thing for sure, Matt. Well, thanks again.

Matthew R. Drayton: Thank you.

Anita Brick: And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.