The Line that Went Up and to the Right!

Many years ago, I worked with someone who I didn't see as very capable. He was in a completely different business unit and we rarely interacted so I just filed this away.

One day, we ran into each other at the office. I asked how his team was doing.

He pulled out a folded piece of paper from his wallet. On it was a graph with a line going up and to the right.

No labels, no title, no explanation. Just a printed line that was up and to the right. He smiled and said "they were doing great" using the graph to illustrate his point.

I remember being confused. When I asked what the graph was about or what the X and Y axis depicted, he said he would have to get back to me. It didn’t make sense to me at the time, what did that even mean? As somebody who works with data, I couldn't wrap my head around why this chart of a random line would even exist. From my perspective, it showed nothing.

Fast forward a decade, and that same person has built a solid career with steady promotions and growing responsibility. His career has been an up and to the right line.

Looking back, I’ve come to realize he might have understood something I didn’t at the time. While I was focused on data, structure, and precision, he was focused on something simpler: being a nice guy, being predictable and trustworthy, and giving confidence to the people above him. That chart gave people confidence that his team was successful.

It’s easy to equate success with intelligence, but inside organizations, other skills matter just as much:
- Communicating simply
- Making people feel comfortable
- Projecting optimism

It is also easy to see only cognitive intelligence and ignore social intelligence, political intelligence, and practical intelligence.

I used to laugh at that chart. Now I see it as a metaphor, a reminder that people bring very different sets of skills to work. And, different jobs require different skill sets in order to be great.

Have you ever had a moment like this where someone you underestimated taught you something important about how people actually get things done?