Must-read post on leadership, places of grace, empathy, recognizing that each of us is part of something greater than us, and well, just go read - by Dave Rogers of Groundhog Day. Snippets below:
There is something that keeps a group of people together that is more than just a paycheck. We "honor" individuals within our group as a way of renewing and strengthening that thing that keeps us together. It's about faith, which is a word that is much abused of late. It's about keeping faith with one another, and the really important things we believe, even if we don't think about them much. To honor someone is to keep faith with them. Honor, the noun, is the quality of having kept faith with one's fellows.
Leadership is the act of renewing and strengthening that faith. Leadership is embodying that faith and living it, having it be a part of one's life, recognizing that each of us is a part of something greater than ourselves, and that's not our company or our corporation...
For a while, after 9/11, some pundits opined that the event would mark some watershed in American history, that it was the end of the Age of Irony. They were wrong. We do have a problem in this country, but it's not going to be solved by a particular economic "sector." There's no faith-based program to address this particular need. There's no catchy slogan, no social software solution, no pill, no gene therapy, no stem cell, no Supreme Court decision that's going to fix what's wrong with this country. But then, there doesn't need to be, because what's wrong can be fixed by you and I. Indeed, it will only be fixed, if you and I fix it.
I'm not an ideologue. I don't have any particular view of the world that I want to promote, other than maybe two ideas: First, know thyself. And second, you must become the change you wish to see in the world...
That failure in leadership was not an accident. It was a result of each of us failing to keep faith with each other. - Dave Rogers
I'd like to say that this empathy business isn't about forcing ourselves to be a "good person." Nor are we bad if it appears uncomfortable at first. I'm not sure you could have found a more self-absorbed person than me three years ago. But it's only been dawning on me since that keeping a wall up is a constant effort...and an effort many of us have been reinforced to keep up. Being open and connected to something greater than ourselves is innate. Much more fulfilling and freeing and lighthearted to drop the efforting. Back to Dave:
I'll tell you a sea story. Maybe two...
When I was executive officer of USS JOHN HANCOCK (DD-981), I had to perform my first burial at sea. Up until that time, I don't recall having ever done one before. I certainly hadn't participated in the ceremony. That was about to change.
And the first time I did it, the wind swirling around the stern caught the ashes and blew most of them back up onto me in my dress blues and the deck of the ship.
I was not a happy guy.
He says he considered burials at sea to be quite a "pain in the ass" for some time. I'd made my own way to the Bangkok offices of the U.S. Embassy (without aid from our embassy). Them coming to Phuket would be rather inconvenient - never mind that every other country's embassy reps were there. A whopping pain in the ass. It's Christmas time, forchrissakes.
It's now three days after the tsunami hit. I'm at the internal American Express travel office. One embassy employee is getting a ticket to go to Phuket the next day.
"Tomorrow?!" I gasp. "You guys needed to be there on Monday morning [that's day after, the tsunami hit approximately 10:15 a.m. Sunday]." (And, do you notice the four-day delay? Coincidence?) He know we're survivors. I'm on crutches. He mumbles some excuse about "assessments" needing to be done. But. No concern. No questions.
A wall greets me.
Another guy seems downcast for the poor enlisted men who will have to respond to the disaster and interrupt their holiday. I rarely get angry. But I was livid. Sometime during that office visit I meet a Jakarta-based embassy employee who says she was ready to turn her passport in. "Even Bulgaria is treating their citizens better," she says.
I only dealt with one U.S. Embassy employee whose eyes were not averted or vacant, whose stance wasn't cold and aloof, who proffered help without excrutiatingly specific detailed questions, who was not defensive about being low on the totem pole and it wasn't their fault (you could at least pretend to care). This one employee remains vividly in my memory and his name is Guy. He was a Place of Grace. Thank you.
The people of Thailand were warm and generous even under their own duress and distress. I cried only three times in Thailand; once I burst out because it pierced me so irrevocably to witness how caring complete strangers could be. Complete strangers, are we really, really? That's one main reason I'm going back to the tsunami-struck Indian Ocean countries for the anniversary - to write about our capacity to be resilient and to "honor" each other and record what those in the tsunami aftermath have to teach us.
I couldn't be incentivized to care about the people whose ashes I consigned to the sea's embrace. I got the same paycheck whether I cared about them or not. I couldn't be incentivized to talk about things like faith and keeping that faith with one another. I could have stood up there and told a few jokes, highlighted the achievements of my retiree's career and gotten away from that podium without ever breaking a sweat.
It was easy, when we would be working hard training at sea, to understand why we were working so hard. If we didn't work hard during a main space fire drill, we knew many of our shipmates might die, and we might lose the ship. There's no place to run in a fire at sea. We knew when we were working hard during general quarters drills why we were working so hard, because otherwise shipmates, both our own and those on other ships, might die if we didn't get the job done. The fear of death is a pretty good incentive. But there are a million things we do that are inconvenient, many that are hard, that have nothing to do, directly, with staying alive. But they have everything to do with being a part of something larger than ourselves. We lose sight of those things too often. Indeed, for myself, I never had sight of them until I was put into the middle of them and had to wonder why I was doing this? Who cares about a box of ashes of some stranger? Certainly, he was beyond caring.
Being in the Navy, or any branch of the military, is a form of public service. Part of what some people call the public sector. Something we've lost sight of is the meaning and the value of public service. Like our infatuation with our clever technologies, we've become enamored with the many supposed virtues of the marketplace, and its rewards for efficiency. But where is there room in the marketplace for keeping faith with one another? Faith isn't a commodity that can be bought or sold. If there is a place, how does it compare in priority with things like maximizing shareholder value, or the bottom line? Who is the competition when it comes to keeping faith with one another?
What happened in the failures of government in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was not something intrinsic to the nature of bureaucracies or the public sector. What happened was a failure of leadership, a failure to renew and strengthen the shared faith that makes each of us a part of something larger, and hopefully, better than we are as individuals. What happened was a failure of leadership to keep faith with us. - Dave Rogers
I'd be tempted to say that Dave's my new hero. Except that I know whatever one admires in another is present in all of us.
Bonus: I think you can see how this snippet from Time relates. It's too easy to blame Bush et al and not look closely at ourselves. "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but don't consider the beam that is in your own eye? (Matthew 7:3)":
It isn't easy picking George Bush's worst moment last week. Was it his first go at addressing the crisis Wednesday, when he came across as cool to the point of uncaring? Was it when he arrived in Mobile, Ala., a full four days after the storm made landfall, and praised his hapless Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director, Miichael D. Brown...
Or was it that odd moment when he promised to rebuild Mississippi Senator Trent Lott's house - a gesture that must have sounded astonishingly tone-deaf to the homeless black citizens still trapped in the post-apocalyptic water world of New Orleans... Even when it came to enacting the role of Consoler in Chief, he sometimes sounded more like a quartermaster, running through long lists of things the goverment was sending to the Gulf Coast, rather than emphathizing with people. - "Dipping His Toe Into Disaster", September 12, 2005, Time Magazine "An American Tragedy" issue
p.s. I wrote in more than one post about my reaction to the U.S. Embassy in Thailand's aloof front in the tsunami aftermath. This one, "Witness From the Heart," probably gets my point across best.
Technorati tags: Flood Aid, Hurricane Katrina, Marketing | Credits: Flickr photo by Cadwyn Rydlyd
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