Father’s Day last weekend got me thinking about advice.
Over the past few weeks, two different people reached out after becoming managers and asked essentially the same question. One was my son. The other was someone from one of my former teams who had recently stepped into management.
Their questions got me thinking about the person I used to call when I needed advice myself.
My father.
My dad spent most of his career in business strategy and leadership roles. Over the years, he worked at IBM, ITT, US Videotel, and later at Lexmark. He was an avid reader with broad interests. History, business, technology, politics, economics — almost everything interested him.
He used to tell me that college wasn’t really about learning a specific subject. It was about learning how to learn, because you never stop learning.
At the time, I mostly filed that under “things parents say.”
Looking back, I realize he spent the rest of his life proving it.
One of my earliest memories of that mindset involved a puzzle competition in a magazine called Games.
The grand prize involved solving a word puzzle, and my father decided that instead of tackling it by hand, he would use his APL programming skills to try to solve it. APL stood for “A Programming Language” and made heavy use of mathematical notation and Greek symbols. It was not exactly a gentle introduction to programming for a kid.
At the time, computer access wasn’t something you took for granted. My father rented time on a computer and had a terminal in his office that printed its output on paper. In the evenings, we would sit together, entering words from the dictionary to help build the data set for his program.
He didn’t win the contest. I think he finished second.
But looking back, that probably wasn’t the most important outcome.
Without realizing it, he was introducing me to computers, programming, problem solving, and the idea that difficult problems could be approached in creative ways.
In his 80s, he decided to take a course in quantum physics simply because he wanted to understand it better. I guess he was always trying to figure out how things worked.
He was, however, really (and I mean really) bad at making PowerPoint slides, that is, unless you like an abusive use of yellow on purple for slides.
When I was younger and wrestling with a difficult decision, whether it involved work, family, or life in general, he was often the person I called. He would listen, process what I was saying, ask questions, challenge assumptions, and help me think through the situation.
Looking back, I don’t remember many specific answers he gave me. What I remember is that after talking with him, I usually understood the problem more clearly. More often than not, I arrived at an answer.
He just helped me get there.
When they asked for advice, I found myself reaching for the same ideas I always come back to: be authentic, treat people the way you’d want to be treated, focus on what matters, and do quality work.
As I thought about those ideas over Father’s Day weekend, I don’t remember my father explicitly teaching me any of them.
I don’t remember conversations about leadership frameworks, management techniques, product strategy, or organizational design.
What I remember is watching how he approached people, how he approached problems, and how he carried himself.
Looking back over my career, the decisions that still bother me are rarely the ones that failed. Products fail. Strategies fail. Hires don’t work out. Those things happen.
The decisions that stayed with me were the much rarer moments where I wasn’t fully true to my own principles. The moments where I compromised more than I should have, avoided a difficult conversation, or failed to live up to the standard I expected from myself. Those are the decisions that cost me sleep.
Looking back, I think that’s another thing I learned from him. Not that you’ll always be right. Not that you’ll always succeed. But the decisions you can live with are usually the ones where you stayed true to your principles.
He listened. He learned. He cared about doing things well. And he tried to do the right thing.
The older I get, the more I think the most important lessons are learned that way — not through instruction, but through example, through years of conversations that seemed ordinary at the time.
My dad was a good man.
Looking back, I suspect many of the things I value in leadership have less to do with management and more to do with the example he set.
If some of those ideas now find their way into the advice I give my son and others beginning their own leadership journeys, then perhaps that is one more way those conversations continue.