Trey Smith
People have their specific talents; things have their specific forms. Some find the responsibility for one too heavy, while others find the responsibility for a hundred still light.Back when I was in grad school, I had a brainchild to hold a conference at our school about Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs). I had read several articles about how STDs were running rampant on the nation's college campuses and I decided that our school's student government (of which I was a member) needed to address the issue.
~ a passage from The Book of Leadership and Strategy by Thomas Cleary ~
I pitched my idea to the president of our student government association and she gave me the green light. For the next month, I worked tirelessly on this project. I produced several very creative Public Service Announcements with a local radio station to encourage attendance of students on our campus as well as area high schools and the general public. I contacted several experts in the fields of health and mental health; surprisingly, many agreed to participate for nothing more than travel expenses. I secured classroom space for the various presentations and made arrangements with campus security.
About 2 months before the conference was to be held, I met with the president for a status update. When she learned of all the work I had done to insure we would have a top-notch conference, her reaction blew me out of the water. She wanted to pull the plug on the whole endeavor!
Why? Because she didn't think that one person could pull it off! I said, "What do you mean? I am pulling this off all by myself." We went round and round. What it came down to was that she couldn't commit sufficient time to the effort and she felt that, without her crucial involvement, there was no way it could possibly succeed.
In the end, she gutted the program I had worked so hard to set up and removed me as the coordinator. Instead of being a major conference that involved several universities in our region, it turned into a dinky event, one that was completely disorganized and mismanaged. No more than a few students and no one from the local community attended which defeated the whole purpose.
Needless to say, when the event flopped, she placed the blame for the program's lack of success on me. If I hadn't set my sights so high, she reasoned, people wouldn't have expected so much!
Of course, both my wife and I have a different take on the whole fiasco. If she had simply stood aside, I had the situation completely under control. I had all the bases covered and several backup scenarios to deal with unforeseen circumstances. What seemed way too heavy for her wasn't too heavy for an OCD person like me at all.
Subsequent to this experience, I served as the lead staff member -- often pulling them together all by myself -- of more than a dozen successful conferences for a wide variety of groups. The STD conference could have been one of these successes too!
To read the introduction to this ongoing series, go here.
The SG president wanted to claim some credit; you were not a "team player." I am not really a team player either, but in most organizations, that is the key.
ReplyDeleteHere's the ironic thing. I am the consummate team player. She could have bagged all the glory of a successful conference and it wouldn't have made a lick of difference to me. I have rarely been concerned with the fanfare of success -- let others sop it up. What matters to me is that the event or program serves a useful purpose.
ReplyDeleteIn almost every one of those subsequent successes, I stayed in the background and let others be the public face. It was very Taoist of me before I even heard of the word!