The most memorable glass of water Bill Gates ever had, he didn’t drink. When he was twelve years old, Bill Gates had a conflict with his parents. He got angry, yelled at his mother, and his father admonished him. What was remarkable about this unpleasant but not uncommon exchange, the kind that occurs in most families, was how extraordinary it was for Gates.
The conflict itself was not unusual for the Gates family, as Robert Guth reports in last weekend’s issue of the Wall street journal. Through conversations with Bill Gates Sr. and other family members, Guth discovered that Gates’ family environment was very competitive. They often played cards, board games, table tennis, and other sports. There were also discussions. Even as a child, Bill Jr. was confrontational, sparking intense arguments with his parents.
In the article, Guth focused on what it was like for Bill Sr. to raise Bill Jr., who would become one of the most influential business leaders of our time. At 6’6 “, Bill Gates Sr. dominates even into adulthood his son, although he never exercised a commanding presence. And despite competition and family squabbles, Bill Sr. rarely lost his composure.
Until one day Bill Jr. yelled at his mother in an argument. Bill Sr. quickly doused his son with a glass of water and told him to be more respectful.
This was such an atypical incident in the Gates family experience that it survived vividly in the family tradition. They remember it and talk about it, and Guth even led her front page story with this “water drop” anecdote.
However, as Guth relates, only rarely did the Gates family enter into negative conflict. The water splash puts a memorable punctuation mark on the incident, but it was an isolated incident of loss of temper and poise on Bill Sr.’s part, not one of many examples.
The glass of water that Bill Jr. used but did not drink stands out by exception. It was a rare departure from the way the Gates family used to deal with conflict and how Bill Jr. learned in his early years about how to handle conflict and deal with difficult people (like himself!).
In addition to learning about conflict, there are obviously many factors that helped shape Bill Jr.’s eventual business success, including, for example, his natural drive and intelligence.
Chance surely played a role as well. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell recounts how Gates, as a child in the 1960s, had extensive access to state-of-the-art computing resources near the University of Washington. Bill Jr. spent more than 10,000 hours working on computers when he was young, exceeding the time that even most world-class computer scientists had at the time.
Gates’ unusual access to computers in his youth equipped him with invaluable technical knowledge to help him succeed in the software industry. However, his computer science background does not explain how Gates accomplished the even more unusual feat of successfully leading an organization through decades of sustained success through all stages of growth, from inception to becoming a global leader.
That story is not just technical, it is interpersonal. Among the important interpersonal factors driving his leadership success is how Gates managed to handle conflict effectively enough to keep talented people working with him through countless challenges over the years.
It is worth considering that Bill Jr.’s family experience may have helped him internalize the distinction between intensity and insult that often make the difference between creative conflict and negative conflict.
We all need to consider our own “water dropping” incidents to remind ourselves to manage the crucial difference between creative conflict that helps people move forward as a group, be it a family or a business team, and negative conflict that it generates resentment and fragments a grouping into factions.
By the way, Twelve-year-old Gates said in response to his father’s stream of water, “Thanks for the shower.” Because this incident is apparently the worst conflict young Gates had with his father, who otherwise so successfully modeled composure and walked away from negative conflict, he might now say, in hindsight, “Thank you for the lesson.”