SHAMELESS PLUG
Since this is the week leading up to Easter, I’ve been thinking a lot about what Jesus said: “Let the little children come to me.” Some of these “little children” are battling cancer. Won’t you join them in their fight? Our daughter Grace has! On Saturday, April 4, 2015, she’ll have her beautiful long hair cut and donated to raise money to research the cancers afflicting these children. https://www.stbaldricks.org/participants/mypage/776299/2015
Thanks ahead of time for your generous support of the little children through St. Baldrick’s Foundation!
Today’s post:
A man goes to a psychiatrist and says, “My brother has gone crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.”
The psychiatrist asks, “Have you told him he’s not a chicken?”
And the man replies, “I would but we need the eggs.”
This week lots of kids will be going on Easter egg hunts. When you see or hear of their exploits I hope you’ll think of this old yolk (groan) and the story I’m about tell.
credit: http://www.photos-public-domain.com
I learned two great leadership lessons from the business guru Tina Fey. (While she’s not known as a business guru, she’s very funny and a smart and gifted leader of other [crazy] writers like herself).
Leadership Egg 1: How to Get the Eggs
What makes the above joke funny is that it brings to light the reality that we are all a little bit crazy. The question we need to ask ourselves is, “how can I roll with another person’s craziness, my own craziness or our joint craziness?”
Fey illustrated this well in this story of her own craziness.
October 2001, the month after 9-11, was not a fun time to be a joke writer in New York at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, which is less than five miles uptown from Ground Zero of the World Trade Center. Fey was in her dressing room trying to come up with fun topics for the Weekend Update sketch on Saturday Night Live. She was reading news clipping about Afghanistan, the Taliban, Saddam Hussein and anthrax postal fatalities. How was she going to get material from this?
As if things weren’t grim enough, this came on her dressing room TV as she was working:
Breaking news. Anthrax has been found at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. CDC officials are investigating the potentially deadly substance, which was found in a suspicious package addressed to NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw and mailed to his offices at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
Being at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Fey said to herself, “I give up.”
She put on her coat, walked past friends and coworkers without saying anything, walked past that week’s SNL host Drew Berrymore, got on the elevator, walked out 30 Rockefeller, walked up Central Park West to 96th Street then went to her apartment on West End Ave. where she was , in her words, “waiting to die.”
Several hours later her boss Lorne Michaels called and said, “We’re all here. You and Drew are the only ones who left…and Drew came back a few hours ago, so…We’re ordering dinner, if you want to come back in.”
Fey went back into the office as if it were her idea and not her boss’s. During the subsequent NBC News team meeting, she learned that they had to wait in the building while everyone on floors two to six below them were swabbed to test for anthrax. She recalls, “I remember feeling tremendous affection for everyone there. I felt like we were a family and that if we had to go, at least we’d all go together.”**
Reflecting on the wisdom of Michael’s leadership style, Fey notes that “he knew how to get the eggs.”
Leadership is about reading people, knowing what they need, and giving it to them. Michaels knew Fey was crazy and yet knew her well enough to give her what she needed. Fey needed gentle confrontation, a reality check on the truth of the situation—that only she and Barrymore had left the building and everyone else was there and still very much alive. And Fey needed an appeal to her SNL family loyalty—so Michaels invited her to rejoin the team for dinner.
The art of leading not only others but ourselves involves knowing how to get the eggs from a crazy person.
And aren’t we all sometimes that crazy person?
Check back next week for the second leadership egg!
**p. 130, Bossypants (photo credit: Amazon)
Toolkit:
What motivates you and gets you unstuck when you’re “crazy?” Is there anything you need to change in how you lead and motivate yourself?
What motivates your team? What’s working well or what do you need to do differently to “get the eggs?”
SHAMELESS PLUG
Since this is the week leading up to Easter, I’ve been thinking a lot about what Jesus said: “Let the little children come to me.” Some of these “little children” are battling cancer. Won’t you join them in their fight? Our daughter Grace has! On Saturday, April 4, 2015, she’ll have her beautiful long hair cut and donated to raise money to research the cancers afflicting these children. https://www.stbaldricks.org/participants/mypage/776299/2015
Thanks ahead of time for your generous support of the little children through St. Baldrick’s Foundation!
