Good morning from a crisp and sunny Toronto. I hope this edition of Leadership Notes finds you well.
Some years ago I was involved in an interesting human resources question with a firm.  The firm had a long standing contest on Hallowe’en where each of the floors (largely divided by department) would try to outdo each other with Hallowe’en decorations. It was really wonderful, stepping off the elevator into cobwebs and dim light, “monster mash” kind of music and the ubiquitous pumpkins. People prepared for weeks in advance and it was known as a great team building opportunity.

I was consulting with the firm on human resources issues and leadership coaching, and had become an unoffical ombudsperson.  An employee approached me early in November one year and wanted a quiet word. Sitting in a private meeting room the employee explained that Hallowe’en was a time of great personal stress as their religious beliefs were offended; ‘pagan’ was a word they used. We evenatually did find a solution that honoured the individual’s religious beliefs and allowed for the rest of the organization to still enjoy their decorating. And I have thought of that conversation often in the intervening years. You see, most, if not all human cultures have some ritualized way of remembering ancestors. And here in the West, dominated as we have been by Judeo-Christianity for so long, we are not unique. The word Hallowe’en is a contraction of ‘All Halllows Eve’, thus called because tomorrow, November 1 is known as All Saints Day in the Christian calendar. It is this time of year that we remember our ancestors. The people in our lives and the lives of the communities in which we serve whom we honour and hope we live up to their legacy.

Elie Wiesel tells a story of a young man who is a “freedom fighter” in British Occupied Palestine in very early 1948. The leader of this young man’s group been arrested, tired and convicted, and is now awaiting execution for terrorism. The group has since kidnapped a British soldier, and will execute him at the same time as their leader is hanged. The young man is ordered to do the killing and so sits in a room with the soldier, waiting for dawn. The room slowly and surely begins to fill with people, and as the young man sees them, he realizes they are all members of his family, people from his village in Poland; the rabbi, the baker, his aunts and uncles. And there, standing in the midst of them is a little boy. It is him, the day before he was transported to a concentration camp. Everyone in the room except the soldier and the young man is dead. The young man asks the little boy, ‘why are you here?’ The little boy says, ‘don’t you know? We’re here to see what you will do?’

And so, as leaders, as we prepare for Hallowe’en with our families and friends, I urge you to take a moment or two this week to think about the people who have gone before you, knowing that they are (figuratively if not literally) watching and waiting to see what you and I will do next.