Before diving into the leadership lessons, let me provide some context. To maintain my physical and mental health I go for regular walks or hikes after work and sometimes listen to audio books while I am walking. Below is an example of a trail I frequent and what my normal every day mundane walk is like.
I often see birds, squirrels, and other small animals. But recently I was not paying attention to where I was going because I was fiddling with my phone trying to make adjustments to my audiobook. And to my surprise I almost ran into this little friend:
While this cute little creature is just a juvenile, if I hadn’t noticed it in my periphery because of its bright white fur that moved as it was turning to threaten to spray, I would have been smelling really poorly for a week or so simply because I was not paying attention and needed to be more mindful rather than multi-tasking. Thankfully I was able to react and jump away before being sprayed, as I’m pretty sure my wife would not have been impressed with me for the following week or so.
As such I was originally going to write this entry connecting being truly mindful as a leader with the skunk as a metaphor for the unexpected things that get thrown at you as a leader.
However, I didn’t end up writing that initial version because the side lesson also was that dumb luck can help (I didn’t get sprayed even though I was not paying attention), so the full impact of the lesson was diminished.
However, the following day I was out walking again after work. And thankfully I remembered my lesson from the previous day as on this day I encountered another new friend:
Again, fortunately I had learned from my experience with the skunk the previous day, as I saw this snake well in advance to be able to deal with it mindfully and calmly rather than in the panicked reaction that I had the day before. For those who don’t know me, I’m terrified of snakes and even though this one was most likely not poisonous, snake bites are nasty and can cause things like staph infections. But because I was being mindful I was able to see it well in advance and steer well around it.
Our two animal friends are metaphors for leadership situations and teach us two leadership lessons.
The first lesson is that while they could literally bite me in the butt, they represent the challenges and opportunities that arise in our daily leadership lives and represent that if we’re not paying attention and are not being mindful, we can metaphorically be bitten in the butt. But if we are being mindful we can handle even highly problematic problems in a productive way.
The second is to actually learn from your mistakes. As I was walking on the second day, I was still listening to a book, but this time, I made sure my adjustments were made before I started walking as well as stopped on the trail when I needed to make further adjustments. And lastly I made sure to always be scanning the trail, which as you can see from the picture above was crucial as the snake was much more camouflage and hidden even in plain sight than the skunk.
Post script: no animals were harmed in the writing of the story. Just my pride of being reminded of a really common leadership lesson that even as an adult human who leads several teams, that I can be taken out by juveniles of mother nature’s creatures.