Yesterday I was in line at Sprouts with my broccoli and double dipped chocolate peanuts.
The food in front of me, on the conveyor, had no customer connected with it. What to do?
For a second the checker and I looked at each other, bemused, and then suddenly a woman with a child in a cart blew by me, crowding me in a bit and saying, “Those are mine; I have just a couple more items.” She proceeded to empty her cart of another twenty or so things.
It was odd. How did she get some items on the conveyor, and have so many still in her cart. Actually, I didn’t come up with an explanation until later. She must have partially unloaded her cart and then have gone back into the shopping area to get something she had forgotten. She didn’t just leave her cart there, because she needed to take the baby with her.
Her order took some time to process. There was some problem with the card or payment method or something.
Normally, I would have been irritated too. Normally, I’m in a bit of a rush, pushing it, as I like to do, keeping the accelerator down. I like going fast.
But it wasn’t normally. I was on vacation, nothing to get to next that had a time stamp on it, and I found myself to be unphased by the wait.
“It’s not a problem,” I told the clerk. She thought it was. She apologized twice. I was gracious.
I like the feeling of being gracious. It’s a calm feeling, a lack of stress, a lack of judgment. I like not correcting people. I like myself when I am not correcting people who have done something odd or different than I would do, or wrong. I like understanding what is going on.
I like me — gracious.
It’s interesting. Gracious may be coming back in vogue. Maybe not.
Some thinking young people today seem to me to be more interested in understanding behavior than in judging, criticizing and condemning it. Young people in particular seemed to me to be sick of the judgmentalism of their parents, judgements concerning sexual behavior, political orientation, religion.
Some of this may simply be simply their lack of morality or formulated politics or faith. But really, some of this might be a more human desire for freedom, from the control of others, and for freedom, to be imperfect.
Life has its moments, when we have forgotten something we came to the store for, and in which we choose — in a flurry — to go back for. Life has its omissions. Life has its waits.
And in those cases, as in so many, graciousness is good.
I hope someone is gracious with me, the next time I make a mistake.
I looked around the table at my staff. The moment felt good. We were in the middle of an exercise from Patrick Lencioni’s book The Advantage. The instructions were to say something you thought the team member was doing well and add any suggestions for improvement, perhaps something to watch out for that might trip the person up.
It was good, the affirmation, and the honesty. I thought the team might not do well at the part of the assignment where they were to suggest improvements. They did. It was almost like they had just been waiting for permission to be helpful to each other.
It worked, but partly because a number of the team members are already good friends. They love each other, and that already-established warmth and trust, it helped the room.
I like it. I like the power of it. You create an open atmosphere in your organization where people can be honest, in appropriate and positive ways, and the next thing you know, they are establishing a redemptive culture of mistake-making. Cool! They begin looking at each others mistakes and weaknesses not as disqualifying, not as behavior to judge and condemn, not as,”Well, fire her!” but as an opportunity to help each other get better.
Recently, I told someone who we had helped through a tough mistake, “Hey man, we love you.” He quipped back, “I know that; otherwise you would have called the police.” Touche!
Sometimes we do need to call the police, and sometimes we do need to let employees go, but too often bosses and teams default to quick and dirty solutions when we all would be much better served by allowing mistakes to become part of a process by which we create growth and improvement, a process by which we churn out healthy leaders.
Mistakes and weaknesses; all teams have them, we all make them, but in our businesses and our homes and our churches, it is full of warmth, good will and future promise to go through our failures with honesty and love — together.