Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

Archives for October 2012

Saturday smiles: Fun with words edition

It should come as no surprise to me, a lover of words, that my children also seem to love them.

Here are two examples from this week:

Sometimes we just play with rhyming words and sounds, even if they aren’t really words. Corban started rhyming with Sodor (the island where Thomas the Tank Engine lives) and came up with Mordor (check my spelling on that). Which made me giggle thinking about Thomas as the next Hobbit or Lord of the Trains.

Izzy is in that stage where she hears everything and sometimes you don’t know what she’s heard until later when it comes out of her mouth. On her way to watch a high school soccer game with Daddy, she opened the conversation with “Daddy, how did you and Mommy meet? Where did you get to know each other? We don’t have a chance to talk about these things.” Too cute.

This doesn’t exactly have to do with words, but it makes me smile after the fact. At the time, I was hopping mad. I went to the grocery store. By myself, which is rare and usually makes for a less stressful trip. On this particular day, I came out of the store, loaded my groceries, which included milk and frozen veggies, only to find that I was blocked in. I had parked across from a cart corral and behind me was a car with two ladies in it. They were talking to another lady (a friend, I presumed) who was leaning in one of the windows. On the side of the car were the words: “If you died today would you go to heaven or hell?” In one of my least Christian moments, I was tempted to help one or all of them find out. I wondered what would happen if I just reversed slowly. I didn’t want to be rude, so I didn’t even politely ask if they could please move. Honestly, I didn’t want to talk to them because I thought I’d have to “prove” my answer to the question. What irked me most, though, was that other cars were driving around them, glaring. After all THEY WERE PARKED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AISLE. And I chuckle because so often we Christians are so busy with each other we don’t even see what’s going on in the world around us. Maybe I’m still not over it, but the veggies made it home still frozen.

The vice presidential debate still makes me laugh. I actually had fun watching it and following on Twitter. (Does that make me sound lame? Oh, who cares. I am lame.)

And with that, I’ve reached the end of my available words that still make sense. It’s been an exhausting week, and my brain is suffering.

May your week be full of whatever makes you smile.

The wrong way to lead

Posting about leadership on the same night as a vice presidential debate: sounds about right.

When it comes to leadership, I feel like I know more of what NOT to do than what to do. And I’ve learned plenty of what not to do from my own mistakes. I’m contributing once again to a leadership discussion here on the topic: “Whoops! How Have You Grown From Your Mistakes in Leadership?” (For other leadership posts, click here and here.)

Mistakes? We’ve all got ’em. And the sooner we learn from them the better leaders we become. Two related instances stood out in my mind when thinking about leadership mistakes. Both took place in my first “real” leadership position, as a resident assistant (R.A.) during my semester in England.

It was the perfect time for me to test my leadership wings. A friend who had been an R.A. the semester before encouraged me to do it and even prepped me a little for the interview. It meant having my own room (which was a plus because my roommate was a partier and I was not) and a little extra cash to spend on travels and such. It also had a degree of responsibility which was less than it would have been back on our home campus soil but I still took it seriously.

I got the job and went through a small amount of training about how best to handle rule infractions. One of the most important rules was: No smoking. We were living in a 19th century manor house. Smoking in the manor–not a good idea. The first time this rule was tested under my watch, I was hanging out with some friends in their room. We could smell smoke from the floor above us, a common occurrence for my friends. One of them pressured me to go up and confront the girl they knew would be smoking. I, on the other hand, was hoping someone else would handle the conflict. (How’s that for leadership?)

But I went. I knocked on the door. When I was told to come in, I found a girl smoking in her windowsill. I told her she couldn’t smoke. She said, “Why not? It’s my room.” I got upset. I think I raised my voice. She argued back and demanded to see her R.A. I found her R.A. and she handled the situation beautifully, just as we’d been trained to do.

Lesson learned: Training is important. And chances are if you’ve been trained to do something, there will come a day when you’ll have to use it. My mistake was forgetting my training. Instead, I felt pressured to take action and fix the problem and assert authority. I did it all wrong. Maybe if I’d paused and given myself time to think, I’d have remembered what we were taught to do.

The second instance had to do with a girl on my floor. She had a rough exterior (I’m not talking about her looks) and you could just tell she wasn’t going to take anything from anyone. One night her music was too loud and someone complained. So, I dragged myself to the end of the hall and around the corner and asked her to turn her music down. She complied and I went back to my room, which shared a wall with her room. Not long after I sat back down at my desk, I heard some loud thumps against the wall. I was so keyed up with adrenaline from having to confront her, even on a little issue, that I imagined she was harassing me for having scolded her. So, I wrote her up. Without going back to her and finding out what was going on.

When she received her punishment, she came right to my door and demanded an explanation. I told her what I’d heard and she denied it. I apologized, but it didn’t help. The next time I walked through her hallway on my night rounds and the music was too loud, her roommate gave her a look that said, “turn it down” and the girl loudly said, “I don’t care what she says.” I knew then that my authority, my leadership, was doomed. A few months later, when her boyfriend came to visit, let’s just say I took a mini-vacation from my room and didn’t write her up for the things I heard going on that night.

Lesson learned: Assumption really does make you look like an ass. And acting in revenge or out of your own insecurities only leads to more trouble. I’m still not a huge fan of conflict but I’ve learned that sometimes it’s necessary. And it can be healthy. And no one, I mean NO ONE, is going to respect your authority when you “pull rank.” (For more on this topic, click here.)

I’d love to tell you that since those days, my leadership has been perfect. It hasn’t. I still make mistakes. Sometimes they’re well-intentioned mistakes. I know they’re inevitable and I’ll learn from them, but making mistakes still hurts.

What about you? How have you learned from your mistakes in leadership? We’d love for you to join this discussion by commenting on this blog post or over at The Deeper Leader blog.

Stay tuned for more leadership topics!