When I learned to drive, you didn’t take “driver’s ed.” In New York, you turned 16, you took a written test, got your permit (on a piece of cardboard that was way too easy to alter), and your father took you to a big, vacant parking lot and put you behind the wheel.
The third day in the parking lot, my father asked, “You want to drive home?”
“Absolutely!”
I gripped the steering wheel of the 1973 Pontiac Bonneville station wagon – also known as the battleship – and white-knuckled my way home from the Rockland Lake parking lot. Things actually went pretty well. One more busy intersection and I’d be home free! Main Street and Collyer Avenue in New City, New York — 32 miles as the crow flies from midtown Manhattan.
This crow wasn’t flying. I was scared stiff and crawling. I had to execute a left turn across traffic from Main Street to Collyer. There were probably multiple windows of opportunity, but those cars that were 100 feet away looked for all the world to me like they were already racing through the intersection.
A guy in the car behind us started honking and gesturing like only a New Yorker can honk and gesture. Well, my father’s a New Yorker, too. He turned around and gestured, shouted, and rained down the wrath of God, Moses, all the prophets, Saint Michael, Saint Brendan (whoever he was), and Mother McCree for good measure.
All of that made it so much easier for me to make that turn and get us safely home.
An attender at Tony Morgan’s “Killing Cockroaches” event yesterday brought that scene back to mind for me. He said that equipping new, up-and-coming leaders is like that. Chances are they won’t do “it” as well you do “it” (although they might do it better). They might be slow and tentative for a while. Nervous. Scared. Others will start honking and gesturing at them. It only makes it worse.
When we equip new leaders, we need also to create some safe space for them to learn to lead. They need some honking-and-gesturing-free zones. Our role on their behalf is to get people to back off, hopefully more constructively than dear ol’ dad did it that day. But, hey, whatever it takes.
