I Got It Wrong

A colleague recently brought up the relative youth of a fairly high-ranking executive in our company. I was mostly joking when I said I must have done it wrong to have not reached that level that early. This wise colleague then gave me a swift and awesome gift of perspective when he rebutted that no, I hadn’t done it wrong if I had balanced work with my family. His observation was that no one achieves meteoric success without significant sacrifices on the personal front. While there are always exceptions, I know in my heart of hearts he’s right.

I’ve been pretty reflective since my mid-career move last year. Leaving a company after nearly 15 years and starting over gets you thinking…about your values, what’s really important, the impact to your family, and the friends you leave behind. On one hand, I wish I had moved on earlier. It was time before it was time, but comfort zones and the status quo are powerful forces. Awhile back a bunch of factors had caused an apparent, temporary career stall. At least I hoped it was temporary. That’s the thing about being human – we can’t predict the future. But I stayed put, learning lessons I needed to learn. When the current opportunity finally came, we acted on it, but for the right reasons. I now know that if I’d have moved when I first thought about it, I’d have missed some cool experiences and awesome people. And I would have definitely missed some personal growth opportunities which have given me peace and made me a better person and employee. I’m sure it turned out the way it should have.

So did I do it wrong? I’d say yes, but only halfway. I experienced the most career growth during the first half of my career, but I also worked long hours and sacrificed much on the home front during that time. Since a health scare ten years ago, I’ve become a recovering workaholic. I’m doing better at balancing work and family, but that’s when I began to see my career plateau. While I don’t think my new balance explains quite all of it, there has been a strong correlation between my career growth and the choices I made between work and family. I think I did get it wrong–in the first part of my career. I sacrificed too much then. I’m happier now, more at peace. My colleague’s perspective only reinforced that as time goes on, maybe I’m starting to get it right.

“Family is not an important thing. It’s everything.”  –Michael J. Fox

We took a day trip to nearby Eureka Springs on Memorial Day. It’s a neat place–the entire town is on the National Register of Historic Places. Victorian houses, quaint B&B’s, quirky craft shops, and opportunitistic restaurants and snack shops line the tree-lined, hilly streets. It had been a few years since we visited, so I mistakenly turned on the first street which said “Historic Loop”. It turned out that was the long way to the main business district, but at least the ride through town was scenic. It was a lucky mistake in that the girls had never seen anything like it. I was just pointing out the enormous old Crescent Hotel which gives haunted tours, when I took a second wrong turn. I mistook the hotel’s winding driveway for the winding main street. We decided we might as well get out and take a few pictures of the magnificent building. When we did, we noticed a picturesque small church down the side of the hill. We had just started down the path along the church’s garden when we heard a voice call out “Girls!”. We looked back and saw an elderly woman calling to us from her car, stopped where it shouldn’t be, right in front of the walkway. She told us she wasn’t feeling well and needed to borrow our cell phone to call someone to come and get her. We waited with her the 15 minutes until her family came, giving her a soda from our cooler in an attempt to refresh her. We learned that she is on strong medication for cancer, which has prevented her from sleeping well for the last month. They have lived in Eureka Springs for over 20 years but are thinking of moving back to Fayetteville where they would have better access to medical care. She tries to go to the chapel for Mass every day, which is where we found her…Mass had been cancelled for the holiday, but she had not known that. Shortly, she was on her way with her family, and we resumed our tour of the beautiful little chapel and its grounds, and then on to visit the many neat shops in town with the other tourists.

Two wrong turns put us in that nice lady’s path. Or did those wrong turns put her in our path, or both? While we talked, waiting, she told me about her parish’s priest, who they are losing soon to a larger parish. He has a way of explaining things in a way people can understand. He recently explained the Holy Spirit as the love created when God gazed on His Son Jesus, who gazed back at God with love in return. She said she’d never really understood the concept of the Holy Spirit before, always visualizing it as a puzzling, small bird, but that she easily understands the concept of overwhelming love. The lesson had been a blessing to her. It’s funny what you can know about someone in a short time when they don’t have the normal barriers put up.

How many times does chance put us in somebody’s path, with an opportunity to make a small difference at that moment in their lives? And how often do we have the opportunity to be blessed in return for serving them in some small way? I am always in such a hurry, but I’m grateful that on this holiday I had the good sense to go slower than normal and be willing to seize the moment to stop for a photo op, along with an unexpected blessing that we won’t forget. I need to go slower more often.

“When you focus on being a blessing, God makes sure that you are always blessed in abundance.”  –Joel Osteen

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Faith, Hope, and Love

“Three things will last forever–faith, hope, and love–and the greatest of these is love.”  1 Corinthians 13:13 (NLT)

I attended my first funeral for a child recently, something none of us should ever have to do. She was a stunningly beautiful 4-year old, with medical issues which profoundly impacted much of her too-short life. Her parents created an amazing celebration of her life. Pictures of her with her family were being projected when I entered the church – I was in tears before I could sit down. Even the white-haired gentleman sitting next to me lost his battle for composure before it was over. Only the preacher and the speakers giving the little girl’s eulogy – two of her grandparents – maintained their composure during the service. I was in awe at their strength.

There was no way to escape the enormous ‘why’ question on the two-hour drive home alone. So many things happen in life that we struggle to explain, but the death of a child is one of the most difficult. As I’ve shared before, it is exactly this question that was my own strongest guide toward faith. I finally decided I couldn’t reconcile living in a world where too many people, especially innocent children, live their entire lives never knowing love or hope. There must be something more–the alternative is unbearable.

But this was not such a story – this was a story of love and hope. Though terribly sad, the service was also inspirational, focusing on the deep love that was the center of this precious life. I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced feeling surrounded by such a powerful sense of love, even though I was only a bystander. Hope came from our collective belief that this family’s daughter was now fully healed and surrounded by the love of God. This day of love and hope will be with me for awhile, and with it, a deep faith that every life is precious to Someone.

“To love another person is to see the face of God.”  –Victor Hugo

I’m Sorry

I was first made a manager over 20 years ago. I was a terrible manager at first. I know this for certain, because I was promoted over my best friend, and she let me know. My first improvement as a leader came when I volunteered to facilitate high performance team training for my company back in the early 90’s. If you want to get religion on a subject, teach it to a group of skeptical engineers (by comparison, the sales and marketing guys were a piece of cake). The engineers pushed me on everything:  I had to internalize the concepts of empowerment, or I wouldn’t have survived the 10 sessions with them. They taught me a lot.

I learned about collaboration from a tough peer. He was a lifer in a male-dominated industry, and I was a female rookie. I participated in my first 360 feedback rating cycle in that role. My scores were generally positive with one exception, a score so low the consultant called the rater to see if they had reversed the scale by accident.  They had not. Though the results were confidential, I knew where my opportunity was. I worked hard on that relationship; we ended up friends.

I learned about team building from the team I inherited that was cobbled together from five different companies. They were not aligned and didn’t even trust each other. It wasn’t all fixed before I left, but I was proud of the progress we made on several fronts.

I learned about building engagement from the team with which I climbed Mount Everest. When we accomplished the nearly impossible task we were asked to do, I told them that while I was proud of what they accomplished, I was more proud of how they did it. It wasn’t pretty, but we did it, and we didn’t lose anyone on the way.

I’ve learned something from every team I’ve been on—lessons unique to that team and to my stage of readiness as their leader. What I remember maybe better, however, are the mistakes I’ve made. There have been many. I’d like to apologize for:

• Not listening enough
• Not communicating enough
• Not thanking you enough
• Being “too busy” and not making enough time for you
• Not having enough fun

I can’t make it up to those of you who endured my learnings as a leader over the years. I can only thank you from the bottom of my heart for the individual and collective effort you invested in me, and commit to doing my best to apply the lessons you taught me to my current team. I wonder what they will teach me?

“Leaders are made, they are not born. They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.”  –Vince Lombardi

Is Current Religion Serving Its Purpose?

“Is current religion serving its purpose?” is the 10th question in Matador’s list of “20 Questions For Every Spiritual Seeker”. This is a difficult question, as there are so many different religions. Churches have routinely done amazing, even miraculous things in God’s name, while too often there have been others who misused the trust and passion of their followers to do things most of the rest of us are quite sure God does not condone. These examples always sadden me, regardless of the situation or the religion, as they add to the mistrust and cynicism of religion. But religions, just like governments or communities or any other human-created and human-led institution, are only a reflection of our own simultaneous capacity for both awesome love and abject evil.

So given its capacity for both good and bad, is religion serving its purpose? Let’s first examine the purpose of religion. Webster’s definition of religion is “a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith”. If religion’s purpose is to provide us with a belief system, then it is not possible to pass judgment on how it’s accomplishing that purpose without examining every affected heart. I think the real question is for each of us to answer:  Are we getting what we should out of whatever relationship we have with our religion? Our religious institutions are there to meet a universal, human need for meaning. But while churches are there to help us meet that need, they cannot do for us what we cannot or will not do for ourselves. If we are to find that meaning, we must first have some level of openness to finding it. I find this to be perhaps the most ironic paradox of all of life:  for us to find the faith to believe, we must first have the faith to believe. This does not mean that there is no hope for us in finding faith, it only means that we may have little hope of finding it until we are first ready to find it. I am very lucky that others ahead of me had that openness and were ready to help lead my way.

“Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of that faith is to see what you believe.”  –Saint Augustine

The Hardest Day

I’m so very grateful for the hardest day of my life, and it almost didn’t happen. My sister and I were in remote northwestern China a decade ago to pick up my oldest daughter. In 46 hours, I went from waiting to board a plane in Wichita, Kansas, to having my new daughter in a dated, dingy hotel room in easily the most foreign place either of us had ever been in. There aren’t words to describe the shock of that much transition in that short a time. The orphanage director who had brought her to our hotel had stayed only long enough to exchange brief pleasantries through the translator before leaving. Our translator, an employee of the non-profit agency we were working with and a veteran of many of these handoffs, had graciously excused herself shortly thereafter to give us our privacy. The three of us were alone. At first, the evening went well. We brought out the toys and snacks we had brought. They were a hit, especially the soft Asian doll with the almond eyes I had found in a catalog. But bath time and bed time were another story. They had warned us that she may not like baths, as most Chinese children did not receive them. The warning was right. Maybe I should have waited, but she was so dirty, and her clothes were worse. I got her clean as quickly as I could, and she cried herself to sleep that first night.

The next four days were better, spent getting to know each other, receiving official stamps from government bureaucrats on endless paperwork, and doing what little sightseeing there was to do in the remote capital city. We gradually grew hungry, unable to eat most of the local food. I learned that after a couple of days, your body rejects a steady diet of Dove bars and Coke, recognizing it’s not real food…I wouldn’t have believed that before it happened (my sister had also told me as we talked in the dark one night, that my stomach growled at night; I apologized). I had a choice on our last day of whether to visit my daughter’s foster family and orphanage. My sister advised against it, believing it would be too hard on her to see them and then giving them up again. Everything I’d read said to do so, that the child would somehow get the message from the handoff itself that it was ok to go with us. I wavered, but I wanted to be able to tell her what I could about the first part of her life. It was the right decision. The Li family was gracious, and my daughter was clearly glad to return to their home. Mrs. Li was intent on sharing every detail she could about my daughter’s time with them, inherently realizing what I as a mobile American did not fully comprehend:  that we would likely never see each other again. The orphanage director treated us all to an interminable lunch at a local restaurant–food I could not eat, dreading what was to come, my daughter fussed over by the only mother she had known, who corrected my care of her.

After lunch, we visited the orphanage she had been in prior to her foster family. We were treated like visiting dignitaries, and my daughter was glad to see the caregivers she clearly remembered. The grim facilities are difficult to adequately describe. There were two low-slung, gray cinderblock buildings which strangely reminded me of chicken coops. The first building was where the children ate and were cared for during the day. The second was where they slept. There were two bedrooms, one as full of cribs as it could possibly be, at least eight to ten of them, side by side, with barely room to walk between them. The second bedroom was the same, though instead of cribs it was chock full of metal twin beds with rusting paint. The windows had bars on them, and the one door into each bedroom, which opened to the outside, had a padlock on the outside. Clearly the children were locked in by themselves at night. I was horrified. But the third room was the worst:  it was a small classroom, with a blackboard on one wall and desks lined up against the opposite wall. I barely registered the room itself, but I will never forget the children at those desks. These children were older, with visible medical and developmental issues. It was easy to see with a single glance that they were unlikely to ever leave the orphanage. That night, my sister and I talked about this place long after we had turned out the lights back in our dingy hotel room. Neither of us could sleep, but for different reasons:  me because I could not bear that thought that my daughter had lived there; my sister for the children who still did. But throughout that difficult tour, I knew the worst was still to come.

The details behind the goodbye between my daughter and her foster mother aren’t important, but I still can’t think of that event without tearing up. I’m not sure I’ve ever cried that hard in my life, even at the deaths of beloved family members. We were all utterly exhausted by the time we got back to our hotel after a very long two-hour drive. Our only consolation was knowing that we boarded a plane the next morning and would literally leave that experience behind us. The next three days in tropical, Western-friendly Guangzhou were closer to heaven than anyplace could be except home. We stayed in a 4-star hotel and filled our hungry bellies with New York style pizza, McDonald’s, and Hard Rock Cafe. And we rested our bodies and our souls.

I am so grateful for the experiences of that hardest day, for I can share a period of my daughter’s life with her that I would not have been able to without it. And I can tell her about some of the generous, caring people in her home country who gave of themselves to give her the opportunity to come home to her forever family. I have believed since I laid eyes on her that she has some important life work to do. I don’t have any idea what that is, but she will always know that many people played a part in ensuring that she could discover it.

“The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”  –Maya Angelou

Hanging On

I spent the first ten years of my career at Coleman, the camping equipment company. Camping was big in America after the war, and those glory days lasted decades. Coleman got its start, however, as a lighting company, back before the age of electricity. W.C. Coleman invented a safe, bright light for people’s homes. He adapted his company as electricity came through, first filling orders for the military during WWII, and then by the rise in camping, aided by the creation of the national highway system. It was a gem of a family-run company, with wholesome products produced by hard-working Midwest people who cared about the company and what they were doing. My mother worked there for 30 years.

Five years after I started, the founder’s grandson lost control of the company. The details don’t matter, but I sometimes wished I hadn’t stuck around for the next five years as we watched the company’s long, slow slide. Lots of long-term employees, including most of the executives, lost their jobs. We began outsourcing production in a big way to China. The proud culture deteriorated. It was like watching a beloved family member fight a slow, losing battle with cancer. When a second buyout happened five years later, it was clear it was time to get out. Not only did the new owner clearly not share my values, but there was something else, something personal:  having watched the downhill slide for so long, I knew that if I stayed, I was going to have to adopt a hunker down strategy–find a way to stop caring and just survive. I can’t hunker down. Good or bad, I get emotionally invested in where I work. I need to somehow. I have to feel good about what I’m contributing to. I knew that I had to leave to save myself emotionally.

On my last day, I had time to kill before my going away party (there was no more work for me to do, after all), and I didn’t trust my emotions to hang around my area. I took one last walk through the plant, seeing the machinery chugging along and watching the factory workers produce the products we were all so proud of. Only I knew that my life was about to change; the workers were blissfully unaware that theirs would soon, too, as I made that last solemn walk. There were tears at the party, but no one could have predicted then how validated my decision would soon become:  within 90 days, the stock dropped >80%; the company filed Chapter 11; the entire executive leadership team resigned; the SEC opened a fraud investigation; and the shareholders filed a lawsuit. All within 90 days. Obviously the new owner brought some issues with him.

As a business leader, I have thought a lot about what was lost there. The story is similar, or worse, at thousands of other American manufacturers. As time has passed, I have come to believe that the loss of the company only accelerated what came after. The world had already begun to change:  customer demand had changed, and the onslaught of Chinese imports was unstoppable. Though the result of the ownership change negatively impacted a lot of people, I’m not sure the outcome would have been much different in the long run if the family had retained control. Change was inevitable. Those with history and emotion would eventually have had to make stark choices for the company to thrive…choices that would have been difficult to make due precisely to that history and those emotions. While it is impossible to say exactly what would have happened if the family had retained control, it is clear that the pull to hang on to the old ways would have been strong. But hanging on is not always healthy. I have learned that, at least, it is not healthy for me.

“Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.”  –Bertolt Brecht