I’ve had many conversations about closing doors, usually revolving
around someone moving somewhere and wanting to share a piece of their mind to
someone else before they go. My advice
comes from experience, and is always the same:
take the high road. I have
switched schools, school districts and provinces in my education career. Sometimes, I have moved and not returned, and
other times I have landed right back where I started. Wow, how embarrassing—and hurtful—things
could have been If I had told someone off only land right back beside them for
another tour of duty together.
The same is true for so many things in and around any
organization, especially one with as many stakeholders as we have in our
schools. People who work with our hot
lunch programs also run successful businesses in our neigbourhood, and our
parents and friends are the doctors, dentists, businesspeople, labourers, and
family in the web of connections that we call our community. The older I get, the smaller the world seems
to get. I have played 6 degrees to
Johnny Depp so many times that I am pretty confident that I will end up at a
BBQ with him one day. My point is that
we live in a world that is far more interconnected that many of us want to
believe, and everything (as my dad would say) comes full circle.
And, I really believe that this works with opportunities. Do you know that guys who always seems to be in the right place at the right time? Is he always in the right place, or is he someone who lives his life in a way that leaves him open to seeing the opporunities that vavaile themselves? Do opportunities come more readily to people who are ready to see them? I think so.
I have been at two significant events in the last two
weeks. Both were important, both were
private and both were reasonably exclusive.
At one, we had amazing service and an amazing time. At the other, we had terrible service and a
decent time. It would have been easy to
celebrate the “great” event and to criticize the not-so-good one, but when we
stepped back and looked at things the poor service didn’t come from a poor
server, rather from someone who was completely overwhelmed because the event
was clearly understaffed. Was that a
management decision to make the evening more profitable? Maybe.
But maybe, someone missed a shift.
Maybe, someone was sick and couldn’t be replaced. Maybe there was a good plan in place and
something fell apart. In any event, it
wasn’t going to make the evening better by reminding the servers how long it
had been since we had been checked on, and it certainly wouldn’t have made the
service any better. By loosening off our collars and relaxing a bit—sluffing off the poor
service—we had a much better time with our friends than we would have if we had stayed so, well...uptight. We had a good night, despite the curveball thrown at us, because we were ready to have a good night.
I am reminded of a saying that someone in another district
shared with me. He said that you can
never ask a question too many times, as long as you ask nicely. It makes sense. If someone has a job that is overwhelming, one
that they can’t get through every item that they need to in a day, then they
will have to end there day without finishing off every work order. Most people know that they will eventually take some flack for this, so if you are belligerent to them about getting
your needs met why wouldn’t they just make sure that your request is one of the requests
that no one gets to? If the line up of work orders is going to crap on them for not getting everything done, they might as well get the ones done that they can, and if you ask
nice—every time—maybe, just maybe,
you will get your small favour snuck into the queue.
I was raised to always shut the door behind me, and that’s fine when
it’s the front door. Experience,
however, has taught me never to shut the door when there’s a relationship involved. So here’s to keeping your door, and options,
open.
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