Categories
Organization Reflections

What’s Your Natural Advantage?

Bunny Show Jumping
Credit: flickr / Thowra_uk

The first year I worked at a summer camp, it was nuts. Three instructors (including me) took a trip to the hospital, a child ran backwards into a pole, a bridge collapsed, an instructor got fired, as did the woman running the cafeteria that was the cause of one of the trips to hospital, and the wife of President came to campus, with associated security kerfuffle.

The director, was so calm and on top of things, I asked her what her secret was. She told me she meditated for half an hour, every morning.

But she also learned how to leverage her staff, really well. With me, she observed that if I saw our numbers for the following week I would remember them and would be able to work out the classroom layouts. So she would show them to me, and then afterward if she needed to know she could just ask me.

Honestly, I never even noticed I was doing that until she pointed it out.

Smart people get stuff done, but really smart people leverage other people so that collectively, even more can get done.