Lollipops, Poison, and Leadership

 

According to Sheikh Sultan Bin Ahmed Al Qasimi did an interview with INSPIRE-Middle East, “The government should always be the one to calm people," (Qasimi, 2020) when asked should the government be the one to calm people down during an emergency. In reference to the global pandemic Covid 19. What I learned this week in my Leadership and Media Strategies Communication Course at Troy University is we should be someone’s lollipop moment. I also learned how something as tragic as poisoning trees can teach two major universities how to communicate and even bond over a shared loss of two iconic pieces of school history. I also learned that successful leaders are using the servant leadership model and do not even know it. It was my understanding that the government should keep its citizens in the loop with information that affects their citizens directly. However, during the pandemic we found this not to be true.  I also learned, something as small as a lollipop can change the direction of a person’s life forever. I also learned that failing doesn’t mean failure.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.” (Williamson, 1992). I have the worst posture. It is something I deal with daily. The pain of my back hurting because I slouch. I realized early on when I started slouching. I was in the fifth grade and my teacher gave me a compliment in front of the class. During lunch that day instead of being on a high from being singled out by my teacher and given a compliment. I was instead bullied and made fun of and was called a teacher pet etc. That day I started physically shrinking to make myself smaller. From that day up until about a few months ago. I have always been afraid of what people thought of me. I never wanted to outshine a person, even if that meant dummying myself down to not offend others. My fear was that I would make someone else feel bad if my light shined a little bit brighter than others. However, the funny thing about light, it will do what it is made to do and that is shine. You fall asleep in a dark room, but that light from an alarm clock, or cable box, no matter how small the light, lights up the entire room. My husband makes fun of me because the light can be the size of a grain of rice, but I will wake up and put a shirt or a sock over it. For me, I am not sure if it is the idea of the light that keeps me awake, or if it is just the light that is so bright. However, I know I cannot sleep until the light is covered. Light no matter how dim (covered or not) will shine. I began getting recognition at work and within the community. I mentioned in some of my work this week that I was told by my director that I advocate too much for my team. My team typically outperforms and outworks most teams at the company. Not because I lead with an iron fist, but because I tell them that this is their team and their journey. Wanting my team to want to come to work and do what they love, what they have studied for years to do is what drives me. I did not know that I was modeling the servant leadership model. Knowing this now drives me to want to serve my team even more.

Prior to this week I had no idea what The Great Baltimore fire of 1904 was. Something as small as someone dropping a cigar or cigarette into a paper goods warehouse could force fire fighters across the country to centralize their water hoses. Being married for twelve years can make you centralize so many things, especially the way you communicate with the children you are raising. Looking back to the beginning of our marriage our communication was not aligned because we did not have a central way of communicating. It is like we were in two separate marriages. Things I thought were major he thought were not that serious, and things that were important to him I did not care about. It wasn’t until we were older and had an opportunity to fine tune our communication to now, we have a centralized way of seeing things and communicating. Now, our water hoses fit together, and we can parent (most of the time) on the same page. Being part of an ecosystem at work, and in my marriage, it is so uniquely similar. First you must figure out ways to collaborate and see value in things. In my career like my marriage everyday we must start the day with the questions, “What problems are we solving?” Learning from veteran married couples and learning from their blueprint. Now I understand what works for them sometimes won’t work for us. However, we do not want to reinvent the wheel. If we did not learn anything during the pandemic, we learned the importance of communicating with each other. My husband has been a sanitation worker for over 23 years, and I am a social worker. During the shelter in place order, my husband did not have the luxury of staying home, so communication became a major part of our marriage. Weather it was me calling to remind him to bring things home from the store. Or him checking in to see how ever one was feeling. I was pregnant during the pandemic, and our (then seven-year-old) daughter was in the hospital on a ventilator because she had contracted covid. At the time we did not know what it was. We also had a sixteen-year-old son home doing virtual school. The way he communicated with his teachers and friends changed. Our little ecosystem at the time had changed and has not been the same.

Working in child welfare in the state of Florida it is written in law in Florida statute Chapter 39, that a case Manager (social worker as they are called here in Florida) must do home visit to go out and meet with the children and their caregivers to assess safety. Now according to the law this must be done every twenty-five days announced and every ninety days unannounced. During the pandemic this became dangerous, and very difficult to do. However, it had to be done. Now the county that I work in, I feel did an amazing job, with remaining compliance and keeping our children safe during this global pandemic. To date everything is different. We typically assess for safety, permanency, and wellbeing, however, during the pandemic we focused our attention more on the mental health component, not just of our kids, but of our staff as well. Those leaders that were so far removed that did not know what was happening within their own company now had a front row seat in some of the struggles we all dealt with, from technological issues to the clients we service. If we learn communication in a new way, it can be the glue to hold companies, families, and the world together.

 

Qasimi, S. S. (2020, March 13). IGCF: What are the best practices in government communication? (R. Mclaughlin-Eastham, Interviewer)

Williamson, M. (1992). Return to Love. In M. Williamson, Return to Love (p. 339). HarperOne.