Go Be a Beginner Somewhere

Elevation Gain | Post 6 of 6

This month I have mispronounced food, misread signs, driven roads whose rules I was guessing at, and completed at least one entire transaction on smiles and pointing.

I am, in this country, a complete newbie. I'd argue it's one of the most useful things a competent adult can do to herself, and I'd argue it more strongly to anyone who runs an organization.

Most of us live in a small world. Family, neighborhood, the same twelve opinions on a loop. Those circles are where love lives. They're also not the whole map, and when they're all we see, we give the people in them more say over our lives than any small group of humans should have.

Organizations have the same problem. Twenty years in one health system and a person's whole map of what's possible is drawn by the eleven people they've sat in meetings with. Travel breaks the scale. So does a promotion, if you let it.

The newly promoted CNO was the best nurse leader in the building. Now she's in the finance meeting nodding at "days cash on hand" the way I nodded at the man explaining the parking meter. She was fluent last month. This month she's pointing and smiling.

Nobody around her thinks of her as a beginner, because she's fifty-two and has run units for fifteen years. She doesn't get to think of herself as one either, because the uniform (Post 1) doesn't allow it. So she stays quiet in the meeting, learns "days cash on hand" from a Google search at 10pm, and arrives next month one term behind again.

Being a beginner is fine. Being a beginner who's pretending to be an expert, in a room full of people who could help and don't know she needs it, is how good leaders quietly fail.

Everywhere I've been this month there were kind people and there were assholes. Same ratio as home, roughly. The kind ones slowed down, repeated themselves, pointed at the right line on the menu, and asked nothing in return. The other kind sighed.

In an organization, the kind ones are the preceptors. The CFO who says "I'll walk you through the finance packet before the board meeting, every month, until you don't need it." The peer who mentions the unwritten rule before the new leader breaks it. The CEO who sets aside an hour and asks "what's harder than you expected?" and then waits for the real answer.

You don't need many of them. One is enough to change a first year. Zero is how the first year goes wrong.

Go be a beginner somewhere. It'll remind you what your newest leader is living through every day in the meeting she's pretending to follow.

Then go back and be one of the kind ones. The asshole roster is already full.