People I Will Miss

As 15 rolls into 16, I want to look back and remember a few people that passed away in 2015.

Yogi Berra & Ernie Banks - I am too young to have watched them, but it is still tough to lose a connection of truly two of the great people on this earth.

Moses Malone and Darryl Dawkins - Two big men from an era when the NBA was an interest to me and worth watching.

Dick Van Patten - I should mourn the TV dad to Kristie McNichol, one of my first TV crushes. 8 is Enough was a classic show!

Dusty Rhodes - I never was in to "Wrasselin" but i had a college buddy that walked around imitating him, "Baby Doll for 30 Days!" I once saw him riding down the highway with a wrestler that he was supposed to hate.

BB King - This legendary musician helped create my appreciation for Jazz Guitarist Earl Klugh and Blues Guitarist Keb Mo.

Leonard Nimoy - I never was into Star Trek but he was a powerful figure from that show.

Stuart Scott - He drove me crazy with his Booyah and his butt kissing of athletes but the Tar Heel left a tremendous legacy.

Donna Douglass - I watched Elly May Clampett most days after school. My mother often called me Jethro Bodine.

What actor or athlete will you miss most?

O-Line Leadership

My son Brooks played Offensive Line in high school. I love anything about coaching so reading an article about coaching an offensive lineman was interesting to me. Don't judge.

Sometime leadership is just clear and obvious and just slaps you in the face. No explanation is needed. Here is what I read in a recent Sports Illustrated article.

Andrew Whitworth is 6'7 and 330 lbs. He has a bald head and salt-and-pepper beard. He radiates class and confidence. Inside his locker, engraved on his lock-box, is a passage: I want to inspire people. I want someone to look at me and say, "Because of you, I didn't give up." Tacking up a motivational message like this is one thing. Living up to it is another.

This off-season, Whitworth approached the final year of his contract and watched the Bengals draft two potential replacements. How did he react? By reaching out to both rookies, inviting them to his house and offering any help they needed. "At the end of the day, who you are as a man is more important than who you are as a football player," says Whitworth. "For those guys to one day be as good as they can possibly be is more important than whether or not they beat me out. If you're a true warrior, competition doesn't scare you. It makes you better." 

Thoughts on a Rainy Monday

Our schools are going through a debate on Prayer in Schools, specifically prayer before the school board meetings. Recently I read a post from a school board member who asked, "Can't we disagree without being disagreeable?"

I am proud of our school board and also our county commissioners because for the most part they operate with the formula of respectful debate. The challenges for our elected officials at all levels is when the outside forces create a political debate in a way to manipulate the electorate. It has become a do anything or say anything so that "My Group" can win and then we can impose "Our Will."

What if instead of demonizing opponents we looked for steps to persuade them? Maybe I am too idealistic to think that two sides can come together and work for creative solutions.

Steven Covey was right in his 7 Habits for Highly Effective People. One of the habits is Seek First to Understand. I read recently and believe this quote, "If we move to attack before we have taken time to understand, we will not be able to find solutions to the serious problems before us."

Giant Footsteps

It is easy to be cynical today. Sometimes I think our lives would be better if we would walk around with real background music playing. That would at least help us capture the special moments.

I keep a pretty close eye on local, state and national politics. As I look back on my life I wish I would have had more political aspirations. A couple of friends told me I wasn't a big enough jerk to be in politics. Then I have those family members that  say no, I am plenty enough of a jerk!

Here are a few thoughts.

A President must grace and honor the office, the highest and most powerful office in the world. The President must serve this country steadfastly and laudably.  

In the end the presidency is more than a simple catalog of policies pursued, crises weathered, battles lost or won.  It's a stewardship and a sacred trust. It’s a commitment to sacrifice every fiber of your being, every thought, every moment, and everything in service to your nation. Despite the political and philosophical differences in our country, the President who does this well and able deserves nothing less than our humble appreciation and heartfelt gratitude.

  

I hope whomever our particular party nominee is, that they strive to be worthy of the example of the great men who have gone before.  Presidents walk in the giant footsteps of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and more.  They have magnificent legacies to uphold.  I pray that our next President aspires to their example, and will daily make that sacrifice.

Our President must honor not just the office, but the people that office serves. 

Now before you boo or applaud this, in all honesty, this is para-phrased from an episode from the West (Left) Wing. Honesty, hmmmm, that's different.

Earn This

I was thinking about a scene in the movie Saving Private Ryan. At the end of the movie, the Tom Hanks character is on the bridge dying and he calls over Private Ryan, which is played by Matt Damon. Damon leans in and Hanks whispers into his ear, “EARN THIS.”

Its been a year since I lost my good friend and our community lost a great leader, Robin Hendrick. In watching Robin battle this dreaded disease, I think he was saying, "Cam I'm not fighting this hard for nothing." He fought the battle in a way that tells us all to “EARN THIS?” 

We should all aspire to lead lives that transform and impact the the people around us. How can we take life for granted? Knowing this, can tomorrow really be a day where we just go through the motions? 

In a book by Donald Miller, he writes, "How much does it cost to be rich in friends? How many years and stories does it take to make a rich life happen? I think about all the people that I have lost to that dreaded disease and I think of the terrible loss that so many have suffered, yet we are all richer today because of knowing them. It is as if they all left some emotional inheritance of a life that would continue to be told."   

Touched By an Angel

It was crazy on that morning that I flew to Dallas for the funeral of my best friend's wife. Maybe it was because I bottled in so much emotion that week, but about ¾ of the way through the flight, I started to cry. After about a minute the little old lady in the center seat reached over and just held my hand. She never said a word and I never looked up. It was just a warm motherly squeeze. For a second I almost leaned over and put my head on her shoulder but I regained my composure and shuffled around in my seat.

She was in front of me as we walked off the plane and up the ramp. I was looking for her to just say thanks and to explain my tears, but when I got through the doors of the concourse she was gone. I looked left and right and up and down but there was no grandma. She couldn’t be that fast to disappear like that, so I moved around hurriedly trying to catch a glimpse of her. Finally I just shrugged my shoulders and kind of half expected Della Reese or that English lady from the old TV show Touched by an Angel to walk up.

The Leadership Summit - 2015

When you run a small organization, often times you have your day scheduled to be productive and efficient and then reality kicks in and your day goes sideways. You don’t plan for the mini-crises that affect your staff, members or business. 

Large organizations have several layers of Lieutenants that can handle a crisis and often times these crises don’t even filter up to the top. But the leader of the small organizations must be the master of constant changing of directions and speeds.

There is that old joke of how to make God laugh – tell him your plans. Sometimes I think God is sitting and laughing, “Oh you think you’re organized today, well what if the pool heater breaks? Or one of your staff just did something stupid? Can you deal with a mad member or parent? How will you keep on task when a bus breaks down taking kids on a field trip?”

Over the next three days I get to spend time with a group of leaders and we just work on making each of us better: better leaders, better bosses, better spouses and better parents. Some of these friends run larger Y’s and some run smaller Y’s yet we come together and find common ground. We help each other to see the leadership opportunities in front of us.

For most of us, the reality is we thrive on the constant changing of directions and the dynamic it all brings. The next three days often brings a personal energy boost not only to us but to the Y’s we lead. This truly has become “THE BEST THREE DAYS OF THE YEAR!”

Salt & Light Part 2

I received a letter from a woman who wrote that a year before, she was so heavy that she had to be wheeled into the Y. Her husband would help her change and then wheel her to the handi-cap lift so she could get in the pool. Her letter shared how she can now walk in to the Y and change and get in and out of the pool unassisted. The letter noted that she was more than 100 pounds lighter. She attributed her lifestyle change to our welcome center staff calling her name and encouraging her every time she came to the Y. Basically, she had her life changed because we knew her name. That’s powerful.

As leaders, we can go about getting change out of people by doing the typical external motivational things or we can start to tap into the deeper issues of meaning and significance and the nobility of serving other people. Soon it will become a habit and ripple like a wave onto the people around us.

There is nobility in serving that we sometimes lose sight of that adds meaning and significance to work. Part of what happens to us that hurts a servant mentality is we get our scales out, and we start weighing people according to their job titles in a way that compares and dismisses them. On the heavier side we will put the full time staff, or a CEO, or an Executive. Those people might be more important and have more meaningful work.

Then in our minds, the lighter side of the scale gets filled with other management or serving positions of administrative assistant and receptionist and people behind the scenes. When we do this in our minds and in our behavior, we are operating out of a false economy. We are valuing things very differently than God values them. We would be wise to remember that the person at the front desk, or the person that drives a bus are all part of the meaningful work and part of what it means to serve. When we understand that everyone has meaningful work, our role should be to remind people of how important they are and their job is! 

Salt & Light - Part 1

When we were kids, and someone asked us, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” we had this magical response for them. What happened to that?

There are such awesome possibilities with the gift of work. Work is about the creation of value. And no matter what your job is, you have an opportunity to live that out every day. Work gives you an opportunity to make a meaningful and significant contribution to the world. Work gives you an opportunity to live out what it means when Jesus says, “You are salt, and you are light.”

I love when our Y is in a groove, especially when we are away at a retreat. We not only accomplish great things, but we become better people in the process. I believe that is the kind of emotional release that is available in our work every day.

It is a shame that many people go to work every day where there is no direct correlation between what they do and any meaning or sense of significance. There is no creation of value. For those of us who are Christ-followers, I believe it is incumbent upon us to create work environments where it is a noble thing to serve.

It is the nature of God to serve. We forget sometimes in our jockeying for positions in the politics at work that we are called to be a servant.

Early on in my career I watched Harry Brace, the late CEO of the Charlotte YMCA. Even though he was from this huge YMCA you never got the sense from him that what you did was any less important than what he did.

Oftentimes, after our YMCA made headlines, he would call me and congratulate me. Sometimes, he would run into somebody from Shelby and he would write me and thank me for doing my job and starting this Y. I saw him talk to Charlotte program directors and thank them by name for doing a job well done. I heard about him picking up the phone and calling a branch staffer and thanking him or her personally for being a part of the team that made a difference in somebody’s life. I bet he knew the names of everybody in the housekeeping department, all those who would come in late at night to clean up and get the facility ready for the next day.

One of the things that I saw Harry do repeatedly was to visit his people and tell them specifically that how they were doing their job had made his job easier. He would thank them for serving. He had a very quiet way of living among us and reinforcing the nobility of what it meant to serve. He had a great impact on me as I started off in my leadership role.

It doesn’t matter what you do if it’s true that God sees work as the creation of value. Everything you do matters. When you serve, you are most accurately reflecting the character and the nature of God. An amazing transformation would happen in our places of work if that emotion was first and foremost in our minds.

The Parent Trap

My daughter has spent the last five months 12 time zones away. You would think that after five months she would be anxious to get home but now that she is back in the US, she has decided to spend a week on the left coast with her college roommate. So much for being daddy’s little girl.

Recently my son spent his first week after graduating high school at the bastion of sin and bacchanalia with 100,000 teen-age idiots in Myrtle Beach. I could only give him the, “don’t make the same mistakes I made” speech.

I recently reflected on my twenty-one plus years of parenthood and I realized there are a few things that I am sure of…

- The Grand Canyon never disappoints. It doesn’t matter how great people tell you it is, when you first set your eyes on the canyon, it takes your breath.

- Disney is the happiest place on earth until you get your credit card bill.

- And whether your child is 12 hours away, four hours away or just out for the evening, you worry about them.

And I thought letting them cry themselves to sleep the first time was tough.

Do More, Be More, Try More

Dear Staff -

Your YMCA is almost 23 years old. We started in the basement of Robin Hendrick’s house with some legal pads and paper clips that I stole from the High Point YMCA when I left. We started in a basement with just a dream.

I know many of you are tired of hearing me say, “Do more” or “try this.” But that is how our YMCA has evolved. We have always challenged the status quo and tried to be innovators. It was about growing programs, starting new programs, leading our community and somewhere along the way it truly became about making our community better.

Doing more or doing bigger and greater work is part of our DNA. Mankind has always been about reaching and growing. We came out of the cave and we looked over the hill. We crossed an ocean that was supposed to be flat and we risked everything to explore the west. We took to the sky and we discovered the unimaginable. The history of man, as is the history of our YMCA, is hung on “what’s next.”

So when I talk about changing the work of our youth sports programs into a program that develops future leaders and helps create new adult leaders, don’t roll your eyes.

And when I talk about how we can change the declining trajectory of our families by building assets in our households, don’t feel anxiety.

Or even when we say wellness is not about the next big class or trendy program, it’s about changing the culture in our community to be one focused on healthier lifestyles, that’s not something new on the already busy to-do list.

Be it eradicating drownings in aquatics, creating the next great staff leader from our part time staff or even just creating joy in the lives of the physically and mentally handicapped that walk through our doors, our mission and our DNA says we need to do more. We need to find the challenge in front of us and take it “head on.”  

Several great employees prepared the way for you to be able to do what you do every day. And you should have a vision of preparing the way for that leader 23 years from now.

When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before. - Jacob Riis

Penalty Flags

Watching the news can be depressing - Iran, Iraq, Nut and Yahoo, Save an email, delete an email, idiot frat boys.....I could keep rambling.

I do have a couple of thoughts:

1. I wish there was a penalty flag we could throw on the news media for a late hit because the media loves to pile on. They can beat a story to death and show after show after show keep saying the same thing.

2. I am headed to DC Friday, a city that I love. Our government and our politicians should give us hope but instead they give us angst. Term limits and campaign finance reform would solve some problems. It would force them to work and stop all the grandstanding and constant fund raising.

It's hard to be a leader - especially a public leader like a school superintendent, public servant or a municipal manager. When you have so many different people to please, you can't win. The best of those leaders just "DO." When they are damned if they do or damned if they don't, they just DO!

I heard recently at a funeral a phrase that has motivated me to be a better leader: "We're all children of God, very few of us become a Man of God."

That is my prayer for you and me this week!!