3 #LessonsLearned:
1. The most painfully annoying employee to lead is my toxic doppelgänger. A-ghost-of-workplaces-past that embodies my most dysfunctional behaviors in past workplaces.
In our book, we call this person the Self-Appointed-CEO. The CEO no one asked for.
This was me.
I would sign up for a job and spend my time criticizing my leaders and thinking of all the different moves I would make. Youthful arrogance has a purpose in the cycle of the soul’s evolution.
2. Nou wa ne. We reap what we sow. When the Self-Appointed-CEO showed up at Empower and gave everyone a taste of my old medicine, I recognized the fruits of the first seeds I sowed.
I gave him the gift my first Principal (Jennifer Troy) gave me in 2015. She gave me grace and said “maybe you should look into school leadership. The things you care about are what administrators do”.
This forced me to face an uncomfortable truth: I was way too scared to sign up for that job.
3. The Self-Appointed-CEO has a chip on his shoulder. He thinks himself Atlas carrying the world’s burdens on his shoulders. What he’s seeking to heal almost always has nothing to do with the situation at hand. His ego has run amok.
This was me.
What I wanted to feel was power and control. What I was unwilling to do at the time was sign up for the job. We want control without catching any of the flak, the arrows in the back, that the job requires. We want the shortcut.
Got a solution to problems better than your current school/org/company? Good. Go build it. Catch the heat. Welcome the applause and the critiques. Solve the impossible.
By the time, the Self-Appointed-CEO has made the journey of a thousand compromises…the journey required to bring any practical solution to market…life will teach them all the humility they’ll ever need.
You can’t learn the lessons on the sidelines. Get your hands in that dirt.
#leadership