Good morning from Vancouver, where I’m on a bit of a breather from my cross Canada road trip; Charlottetown beckons on Friday! The adventure continues!
I’ve had a wonderful trip so far, great learning with credit union directors in Toronto, wonderful learning with credit union managers in Saskatoon last week, where I also met Marc Keilburger and Adam Kreek. Marc is co-founder of Free the Children (http://www.freethechildren.com/) and Adam an Olympic Gold Medalist and he also, in his spare time rowed for 73 days across the Atlantic before being capsized just days short of Miami. (http://www.kreekspeak.com/contact/ ). And then over lunch with two friends, (the amazing Jane Osler http://www.pjosler.com/people.html , and the brilliant David Gouthro http://www.theconsultingedge.com/david.php who will be joining me in Charlottetown) a most interesting thing happened.
The three of us were engaged in a great conversation about justice. We wound our way to wondering about ‘frivolous’ law suits, where it seems some of us are refusing to take responsibility for our own mistakes or errors in judgement. My story is of tent cards in a hotel on the Great Barrier Reef where there was a warning not to pull shark’s tails in the reef shark infested waters around the island. I can only assume that the hotel had been told they needed to place those cards prominently in the rooms because someone would (or already had) pulled on the tail of a shark and once bitten by the shark, might sue the hotel for not properly warning the guest! It was as you can imagine a great conversation.
When we ordered, David had ordered a coffee in addition to his lunch. After a little while the waiter came over to explain that our lunches were being prepared from scratch and were only a few minutes away. David, still without coffee asked with a chuckle whether the coffee beans were being ground at the same time. The waiter, looked at David with a shocked look, and then apparently realized that he had forgotten the coffee. He stood there, tapped his chest lightly and said, “my bad, I’ll look after that right away.” As I explained to him as we paid our bill, the timing couldn’t have been better; here was an example of exactly what more of us need to do every single day. Acknowledge that we can and do mess up. “My bad.”
In the current zeitgeist of fear and blame, to say “My bad” is almost revolutionary. It is the sign of a great leader to be able to look in the mirror, or into the eyes of people with whom you work and to honestly own up to responsibility. Contrary to popular belief it will not usually be a career limiting or terminating move, just the opposite, you will be respected and your relationships with each other will be stronger.
And it’s good business, we’ll return to Edible Canada http://www.ediblecanada.com/ both for the food and for the leadership we saw in the servers.
May this week be filled with such honest responsibility for each of us.