Future Corporate Leader

You have to wonder how much of our lives is scripted in the pages of our youth. Well, it all is, of course — that's a truism, but it's such a surprise to find evidence of it.

I found this picture of myself the other day. I was 12 and the American flag bearer for my grade school drum & bugle corps, the Epiphany Toppers. It's the only picture I wound up with and look at it (Photoshopped for emphasis). I'm all twisted around… where is everybody? The rest of the color guard is supposed to be on my heels: 2 more flag bearers and 7 little kids carrying one round letter each (T,O,P,P,E,R,S). Behind them are the pom-pom girls, then the drums and bugles.

But there I am. Alone. Certainly a good 10 yards in front of anyone. Definitely out of sync.

The picture isn't a fluke. I was always in this situation. We'd start marching in a parade and one of the officials would tell me to stay, say, two car lengths away from the group ahead of us. I was a sturdy seventh-grader and proud of my role out in front. But I tended to lose my followers. You only had to be in the second grade to become a bugler in the Toppers so we were by nature a slow group, but we marched in holiday parades with high school bands and fire departments and energetic boy scout troops. So the dilemma was always there: slow down to the pace of the slowest kids so we'd be marching as a unit or speed up to the pace of the parade and get all the meandering little kids to (in theory) pick up their pace behind me.

A leadership dilemma. I deal with it all the time. Too often I'm falling out of step to turn around to see what happened to everyone who was supposed to be right behind me. I get impatient. Come on, you buglers, the parade is going ahead without us. We're supposed to be able to march with the big kids and everyone's going to make fun of us when we're still marching in slow motion after all the crowds have gone home.

Sometimes I slow down (put aside my Harvard Business Review, stop pointing at all the unmet goals ahead). The color guard relaxes. The pompom girls put more energy into jumping up and down — they know they look prettier doing their routines in place when they don't have to coordinate skipping forward. The drummers have the rhythm and the strength but they can't go any faster than the pompom girls. The little buglers start meandering out of formation altogether. Once they're allow to meander, they get out of step, their timing suffers, and their music goes to hell. It is, after all, the short-legged buglers who carry the melody — just like (at my current job) the way-too-young child care workers, who staff the residential services around the clock.

I get anxious. I'm only in the color guard, after all, even though I'm physically the one out there setting and maintaining the pace. Remember, people join the color guard because they don't have the skill to play an instrument. It takes the "CEO" — one of those adults with the freedom to walk up and down beside us — to insure the discipline of the entire corps.

I've stretched this analogy about as far as it'll go. But I still look at this photo with bottomless empathy. It isn't just a picture torn out of a magazine… one of those "write a story about this" pictures. In my bones, I know how anxious that 12-year-old was and how uncertain she was about the right thing to do. The adults were never nearby because they were back making sure the buglers weren't vomiting. And so it goes…

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