Unrecognized Leader

Strange, how I balk at thinking of myself as any sort of effective leader.  Over at older2elder, I wrote about the Sept 7-12 (yikes!  6 days!) Omega workshop on becoming the kind of leader the world needs.  About how to make the difference I want to make in the world means putting on my big girl pants, taking deep breaths & just DO it.

It's difficult to admit that I already HAVE done it.  Difficult because that is so not my image of myself.  There are, I must admit, a lot of examples of my showing capable, even inspired leadership, drawing the best out of others, sometimes a best they never suspected was in them.  Leadership,like so many things, is about getting rid of obstacles & distractions so people can knock their own socks off with outcomes.  

The greatest leadership experience of my life came about because someone was ordered to complete bed rest.  When the national team leader of Prudential Healthcare's 50th anniversary had to take a health leave, hq looked around for a replacement.  Who was the closest to Parsippany,NJ?  Little ol' me.

The only reason I was heading up the Central region's anniversary efforts was because MY boss was out on maternity leave & our temporary fearless leader was swamped.  And now I was asked to do that AND take on coordinating all the regional offices events.  

But this was in the fledgling days of internet communication & I - thanks to a couple Ragan Communications workshops out in Chicago - knew how to use it better than most people in the company.  

Right person, right place, right project.

It was a blast, working with my regional cohorts, holding hands, helping with ideas, keeping it away from The Suits' idea of parties & pats on the back and staying close to my idea of paying back to the community & garnering great press.  

What a glorious time!  Helping each region help each of its offices see itself in its best light, showing that light to their local communities and - even more important - to their employees, participating health care providers, hospitals & membership.  We got print coverage, television coverage, radio coverage.  I failed to convince corporate to use car window shields printed "PruCare" as a present (present everyone would have used - and I've always loved free advertising), but that was my only big fail.

Instead of blowing the wad on parties that no one really cared about & gifts that only mattered to the execs, each office developed a community service project.  Instead about feeling good about getting part of a day off, employees felt great about doing something good.  It affected how they felt about themselves, their place in their communities, even their feelings for the company they worked for.

That was my greatest source of pride, and it happened BEFORE the execs tagged me as team lead.  

BACKGROUND ~ ~  I represented Central (about 9 states) at the initial meetings at Prudential Healthcare headquarters in Parsippany.  Everyone else was a regional PR&A manager.  I, a lowly regional editor.

There were a lot of execs there, including a couple from Corporate (with a capital C).  During the second day of meetings, they were all gung ho to have a calendar highlighting fifty years of success be the employee gift.  I raised my hand.  The room fell silent.

I could understand, I started, how they would want to spotlight their years of success, but we might consider going in another direction.  If we took the approach of moving the celebration into our local communities, then we might engage our staffs more fully in the moment ~ and ~ it could give us some nice media coverage.  

The execs looked among themselves, while my cohorts, all of them friends, looked at me like I was among the damned.  We broke for lunch.

Why, my friends wanted to know, had I been so foolish as to tell some of Prudential's Old Guard that their way might not be the best way??  Am pretty sure they were laying bets on how fast I'd be headed back down to Horsham.

We got back from lunch and settled around the table.  The execs looked among themselves, then the most heady of the head honchos cleared his throat & said, "We discussed the suggestion that we skip a calendar and use community service projects to celebrate our 50th anniversary.  We think Miss Lockhart had an excellent idea."  

Wow.  My cohorts thought I was the cleverest of them all & it was just that I thought the calendar idea was awful, with only the execs not trashing them, and knew (thank you Ragan Communications) to always always always turn whatever you are doing into a public relations opportunity.

Pretty cool, long long ago memory & not a bad bit of inadvertent leadership, if I may say so myself!