It's Really The Little Things...

Almost everywhere you go these days you can find another ... Well, you can get more information about becoming a better leader.  And nearly all of it is useful, sometimes if only to serve as a warning on how not to do things.

But in seeing an awful lot of the stuff, there's a bit of a gap between "you are here" and "senior leadership position" - and that's always struck me as a terrible gap leaving people to question a lot of things.

And look, I'm older, so that means I've made plenty of mistakes.  I've done a lot of things right, as well - but sometimes you learn a lot more from your mistakes.  Especially if you have the time and the opportunity to review them.

For many years, as a much younger man, I hung my hat on the old Eagle Scout thing.  Ya know, because I was once a young man who was driven to do something, I earned myself a badge which tells the rest of the world I once did something special.  And in many ways, I did.  I overcame some internal hesitancy and fears of my own, pushed through with an idea that wasn't exceptionally huge, but it was important to me.  And because I was able to get the thing to work, and eventually finish up the world's most demanding book report (as it were) I got a pretty badge and a party.

And I put a target on my back, wrote a line in my obituary, and learned an awful lot.  But let's take the steps in order.

I loved riding my bike.  As a kid, I was rather late to the party because my parents had five kids, I was the oldest, the only boy, and ... well, there wasn't much in the way of "unclaimed resources" hanging around.  But my father took me to a hardware store in a small nearby town, and we together selected a red bike, a three-speed, with a banana seat.  

Yes, I know, some of you went "well, that's cool" and some of you rolled your eyes.  But back when you're eight, that's a mighty big deal.  First of all, in my neighborhood, I was able to keep up with the rest of the guys.  I was on the tail end, age wise, of the group.  Most of them had older siblings, so they got the hand-me-downs.  I didn't have an older sibling, I got the stuff first - if it wasn't handed down by older relatives.  But it was my bike.  

And it was a three speed.  Which, I later learned after starting to pedal the thing, meant the brakes didn't work.  That is, if you pedal backwards, you keep going forwards.  You might lose your balance and crash, which ends up skinning your knee (God forbid you wore pants, because if you did and you fell, Mom was going to be most definitely disappointed in you).  

Then I learned the special secret trick.  You squeeze that silly little bar that stuck out of the handlebars all weird, bang-zoom stopped, you just went from whatever to Zero.  And that was fantastic.  I could go down the shallow small hills in my neighborhood, feel the breeze cooling me off, then choose to stop for whatever reason, quickly.

At least, until I squeezed that handle and ... Nope. Things didn't stop.  The handle became a little floppy, and my only stopping method was to put my toes down to drag myself to stop.  Yup.  Like that.  Then I learned that there was this secret metal repair thing, called "soldering".  One used a tool to heat up and melt this wire stuff, which acted like glue to bond the wires that attached to the brakes to the handle, so I could stop again.

But you see, once that's done, it has to be done again, and redone, regularly.  And when you have to convince your dad you need the brakes to work on your bike so he takes it into town to have the fellow who sold it to you to solder it up again - with the usual charges - then there are other concerns.  

Which is how I first got the holy crap scared right out of me.  Much like the "magical blue smoke" that is contained in many computer parts and is requires for proper computer operation, and once released, it just won't work, the holy crap is that which most youngish folks tend to have that insures their certain immortality.  That is, without it, a young person realizes that it is entirely possible that they might want to reconsider doing the same thing that other fellow did, because it might be a bit dangerous.

Mind you, some folks do tend to keep the holy crap until they reach an age where "hold my beer" becomes the standard warning label.  While some other people never realize the critical nature of that knowledge until it's too late.

I was chasing a friend of mine, on bikes, down the road past my house.  There were two options - a narrow dirt trail that led into a heavily wooded area we tried not to go into because of the rather dense accumulations of poison ivy.  And other things we were supposed to avoid.  Or we could take a hard 90-degree turn to the left, and head down a short chunk of road, maybe some 50 yards, to a much busier, much more heavily traveled county road.  That road was a proper two lanes, with a very narrow - as in about 9" - border on either edge where cars weren't supposed to drive.  

My friend, with working brakes, roared right up to that road, and hit his brakes.  I couldn't.  I shot across the road, and the holy crap left me as, probably six feet from my rear tire, passed the front bumper of some early-70s motor vehicle.  I was probably doing 15 miles an hour.  The speed limit on the road I crossed was 30, but traffic on it regularly exceeded 50, with very limited sheriff traffic to keep the speed down.

So, in short, I missed getting turned into pavement pizza by sheer dumb luck and six feet.  I think I left the surface of the road on the far edge, sailed some few feet over the ditch, then gravity returned, and I was brought down into the pine trees on the other side of the road.  Fortunately, I possessed enough functional brain cells to be ever so thankful I had been missed, and managed to dart back across the road, back into the neighborhood, before my father came home and caught me on the wrong side of the forbidden road.  

So there was lesson one.  A few years later we moved a whole quarter-mile down the road from that neighborhood to my grandmother's home, after Dad finished remodeling it and adding some additional living space.  It was another country road, this one a dead end, versus a loop-pass-through road, so traffic almost always came from one direction, unless it was early in the morning, or on weekends, any time of the day (though Sunday mornings were far busier when people were going to church - but you were too).  And over in that neighborhood, I rode my then larger, less cool, "grown up"-ish bike with the lower handlebars, no additional speeds, but identical other than color (mine was still red) to my sister's new bike.

That moment of terror hadn't been forgotten.  It did lie deeper under a lot of other things going on, then one fall afternoon, with football practice going on, we noticed the ambulance going through town.  It was the year that the town was re-doing the road along the river, widening it, turning it into a proper road with curbs and sidewalks, and oh, yeah, fixing the sewer and water lines to the city edge.  All of this work shut down the main drag through town which became a country road outside of town, which was where the bike lanes ended at the city limits, which was convenient, because the only detour around town also met that busy road right after the city limits.  

Which is why the ambulance had to cut through our quieter side of town to get north of town.  Which was where I lived.  As did most of the rest of the north-bound traffic, as it had all summer long.  But the ambulance was notable if only because it was unusual.  And loud.  

And because I lived out in the country, news took only a few minutes to get around.  In my old neighborhood, one of the houses that had turned over to new ownership AFTER ours, my former Cub Scout pack I'd left only about 2 years before had a new Cubmaster who lived out near us in that house.  He had two kids.  One of them, the older boy, was for some reason out on the side of that busy road without a bike lane that afternoon, after school, on his bike.  He'd been riding slowly, carefully, along the edge of the road, when a semi came barreling south, the same direction he was going.

When you're about fifty pounds or so on a bike and a semi truck roars past at 40 or so miles an hour, there's a bit of a breeze which is created.  Now, I've not been on the road when such a large truck passed me while I was on my bike.  But in more recent years, I've been in motor vehicles when I've been passed by, or had an opposing traffic encounter, with one of those things.  There's a lot of wind, and there's some suction.  

Which is what may have caused this boy to swerve from the edge of the road into the path of oncoming traffic.  I don't know.  I wasn't there, I only heard about it later.  But that was what killed him.

And he was one.  There was another accident a little while later with a young girl in town, riding her bike, and a car hit her.  And another.  And another.  And suddenly, I was at the point where I'd completed all of my merit badges, I needed a project.  And the project I had in mind, from older issues of Boy's Life, was a bike rodeo.  That is, a chance for kids to come to a place, bring their parents and their bikes, and we'd go through some bike-riding activities to make sure they knew how to handle their bikes.  We'd also have some folks who knew bikes to help make sure the bike was properly adjusted for the rider, and worked properly.  

And I'd ask the police department to come in and give a talk and if they had anything, show a movie or film on better bike riding.  And I'd arrange for a friend of mine to take a bunch of pictures so I could document the whole thing for the report I'd have to write.  I got a lot of pointers from my Scoutmaster, and did a lot of reading.  You know, going to the library, asking the librarian if she knew of any books that might be helpful (that's right, kids, before Google we had a human Google; you started with your parents, and if you weren't too big of a pain, they may have had some suggestions, or they might call in reinforcements.  Of all of the resources they had, by far the most powerful was the local librarian.  For some reason, these people came to the job with an almost limitless knowledge of every question ever asked - because they answered all of them), and I was directed to a section with a lot of resources.  

I can't tell you exactly what sort of effect I had on the twenty-four kids who showed up for that bike rally.  I can't tell you that every one of them survived their bike-riding years.  But I can tell you that for the next few years, in fact, until I moved out of my parents house, 9 years after that bike rally, we didn't have any little kids killed by car-bike accidents in town that I ever heard of.  And I was paying attention.

But wait, you're saying, WTF does any of this have to do with leadership?  I was told, after I finished that project, that report, and a few meetings, I was told by folks I was a leader.  Which I definitely was not.  Sure, I'd planned a thing, I'd made some small difference, I hope, and I did send 24 kids home with very pretty certificates I'd gotten as a donation from a printer friend of my father's, who also sat in the back of the room and hand-lettered the participant's names on them so they were very pretty and professional.  

What I learned, later, when I saw boys try to do something similar, was that the only thing I'd learned when I was doing my "leadership project" was that I could, and needed, to do better.  

Which was where I learned one of the most critically important things about leadership.  Any fool can give orders.  Anyone can tell you what they want you to do,.  And if you've got any sort of consideration for them, and any desire to be helpful, if those orders make sense, and you're able to do what they've asked you to do, within reason, there are a number of choices you have to make.  Do you do it, do you ask someone else to do it, or do you blow it off?

A True Leader will, if the request makes sense, is something that will help, and can be done, will do it.  They won't waffle about, they won't dither and look for tools or excuses.  They'll just do it.  Because a True Leader knows that, at the heart of any real Leader, is the willingness to also follow other leaders.  Especially if it's all for the greater good, overall.  

So yeah, there are countless theories and processes and tools which you can study and learn how to use if you wish to become a better leader, but the real leaders also take care to follow those who will lead them, and do so to the very best of their ability.  Which is something I'm going to be working on for the rest of my life.  Not because I'm terrible at it.  Nope.  Because I want to be better at it, and give those who are my leaders no reason to be concerned that I am not doing what I have been asked/ordered/directed/trained/required to do.  Not because they asked/ordered/directed/trained/required me to do it, but because in order for me to be a better leader, I also need to be a good follower.  And I want to be an example they look at and say "more like him."  

So no, I'm not bragging, and I'm not "done" with myself.  I can always learn, improve, and keep getting better.  And no, this isn't a job interview.  This is me, reminding myself that I'm not a complete schmuck, I can always do better, but I've come a fair piece.