It was one of those misleadingly sunny days in Antibes. The sun beamed insistently, begging you to walk along the pristine white beach, take off your shoes, and feel the Mediterranean sea as it lapped at the French Riviera. Do not be fooled: it is horrifyingly cold, the kind of cold that reaches down to your very bones, freezing even someone used to the -30C॰ Ottawa weather.

I was making my way through the centretown of Antibes, my shoes clacking softly along the sun bleached and sand polished cobblestone. Google maps, which were nearly impossible to use thanks to the ridiculously extensive hills that defined the region, kept leading me in circles, and not towards the sole English Bookshop nestled between a small, if well loved, community theatre, and a church older than France itself.

I was on a mission: a mission to recover a book that represented a lost battle. For context, my father, who loves discussing the books he is reading, provokes anyone and everyone into the most passionate discussions. If you’re not careful, you will end up purchasing the latest book he is infatuated with. Normally, I would have been able to rationally resist this urge, but after nearly two months in a foreign country, I missed home, I missed my normal life, and more than that, I missed my dad.

The book, Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, was matte black with alarmingly orange text. From the get go, it was impossible to put down, likely because it aspired to prove me wrong. To challenge the unfortunate conclusion I had recently acquired: some people are just not meant to be managers.

The previous summer, I had stumbled across a junior tennis instructor position at a summer camp. As I heard the owners talk about what it truly meant to run a good camp, to leave a mark on a camper’s life that would last forever. I got a feeling in my chest, a bright white light feeling: This was what I wanted to do this summer, make a difference. I did not play a single game of tennis that summer. A day before camp season started, I received a call to replace a head counselor at another camp, a camp that had a gym full of equipment and absolutely no program to go along with it.

I swung into that school on Monday at 6:50am with no experience to speak of and a hastily made spreadsheet schedule clutched in my hand. By the end of the week, I had delivered an astounding camp experience, and the reviews from campers and parents certainly proved it. I had managed to do that thing the owners had spoken about: make a difference.

That summer, I ended up designing four camps from scratch, working up to 80 hours per week and happy about it. That summer, I did some of my most inspired work as a creator, leader, and manager. So why was it that by September I hated myself, the job, and managing as a concept?

As I finished the summer, I was so overwhelmed, stressed out, and irritable that the most minor of issues would make me fly off the handle. I looked forward to doing my work, but I dreaded my coworkers. I felt responsible for the campers, but I was powerless to prevent my coworkers from creating an unsafe environment for them, or even convince my coworkers that starting fires indoors was in fact unsafe.

As I made my way through some of Horowitz’s arguments, I started to realize that perhaps it was less of a character flaw, but more of a situational issue. Perhaps, I did have what it took to be a good manager, but without someone to teach me how to swim, I had drowned that summer.

The first time the thought occurred to me was during “Chapter 5: Take Care of the People, the Products, and the Profits—in That Order”. Horowitz notes “People at McDonald’s get trained for their positions, but people with far more complicated jobs don’t. It makes no sense” and I thought back to my own training (Horowitz, pg. 92). It was a measly one day affair with pizza, that, aside from an ultimately useless workshop on dealing with campers with anger issues, had failed to prepare me for the reality of running a summer camp. What about water safety? What about fire safety? What if someone got seriously injured and we were located in an area with absolutely no reception?

What if something did go wrong? Who do we call first? What paperwork needs to be filled out? Who was responsible for ensuring all of this happened? This spawned a second issue: it was unclear what any of us were hired for. Who did we report to? Who was holding us accountable? What exactly were we supposed to be doing? All of us were teenagers saddled with twenty kids and let loose in the woods—I'm shocked it didn't turn into the Hunger Games.

Freedom is a two-sided coin: ambitious employees can try out their ideas to create substantial and meaningful change within a company, but not all employees, especially not those in their teenage years, are capable of working without oversight. By dropping by a grand total of two times over the course of the summer, the owners created a power vacuum. A situation that someone like me, full of managerial aspirations, could easily step into: whether or not I had the skills, or even understanding of what it meant to be a good manager.

Had the owners been marginally more present, available to help us resolve issues, share their decades of knowledge by training us, and appear more than once a month to feed the dream for which they had sowed seeds for at the beginning of the summer: the story would have ended very differently.

When I returned from France that spring, I dived right into looking for a job again, and despite how inspired Horowitz’s book made me feel, I was never taking a management job again.

I ended up joining a local tourism company that had recently been bought by two uOttawa alumni in their twenties. Their age, aside from shocking, was both a vice and virtue. They have the drive, ambition, and hot blooded willingness to fight for a dream: what the company could one day become, but they do not have the decades of experience that many CEOs, presidents, and directors acquire through years of grueling… for lack of a better word: torture.

So how can we explain their ability to manage, lead, and inspire? Are they proof that you are either born a manager or aren’t? Are the rest of us doomed if we weren’t born with it? Whatever “it” is? I don’t think so.

From day one, it was clear that things were going to be very different. I knew exactly what I was being hired for. I knew where I stood relative to other employees, and who to consult regarding problems that arose. Training was grueling: I role played phone calls, dealing with irrational clients, and making sales. I learned seven different softwares to manage bookings. I memorized all of our resellers and affiliates. I went from pharmacy assistant, to tourism professional in under two weeks.

As I grew to be independent within the company, I once again felt that sense of freedom, but not in a free fall into a crisis kind of way that had marked my previous summer, but in a controlled way. I knew who to ask for help and I knew that someone would always be there to help. This stemmed from one single commitment that the owners make to the company: being present.

At first, I didn’t quite understand it: why would the owners of a successful business insist on spending so much time with their staff? Nearly every weekend, they were on the ground, doing the same work as their sales people. Everyone knew the owners, they knew how to contact them, they knew that when things got bad, without fail, the owners would be pulling up, hopping out of their cars, and rolling up their sleeves. Because it is not enough to tell people what they have to do, you have to do it. And then, when you’d rather go home and crash, you have to be there to tell them that they did a good job.

At some point, I finally understood what Horowitz had meant in Chapter 5. Yes, proper training and hiring were important, but something begets structure. Something that defines true leaders: caring about your people.

The moment you see the value that your staff bring, and even more so, the value they could bring if you provided them with the right resources and skills, they start to see what they could achieve: what the company could achieve. When you treat the work your staff do as interesting, challenging, and worth doing, they will see their work as interesting, challenging, and worth doing.

If you care about your people, they care about the company, plain and simple.