I didn’t learn leadership from a textbook. I learned it in the room. Sometimes through moments I’m proud of, and sometimes through moments I wish I could take back.
Years ago, one of my leaders needed about a week away from work. Her sister-in-law was undergoing cancer treatment, and she was taking the time to be there with her family. When she returned to work, someone from another department needed help.
I was moving too quickly that day. I was overwhelmed with whatever was happening in my own world, and without giving it much thought, I looked over and said, “She can do it. She just got back from vacation.”
Vacation.
I knew where she had been. I knew why she had been gone. And still, in that moment, I reduced one of the most difficult weeks of her life to a vacation.
It took me a few days to really sit with what I had said. When I did, it hurt. Not because I had simply used the wrong word, but because I realized I had hurt someone.
I sat down with her and apologized. Not the quick kind of apology we sometimes offer because we want to move past an uncomfortable moment. I told her I was genuinely sorry, and I told her that my mistake had left a mark on me.
It still has.
Some of the greatest leadership lessons I’ve learned have been the most painful ones. They’re the moments when I’ve had to look inward and acknowledge that my intentions didn’t matter nearly as much as the impact I had on another person. I wasn’t trying to be insensitive that day, but I was. Leadership requires us to be willing to hold both of those truths.
We can know the operation. We can hit the numbers. We can solve problems, build schedules, manage labor, answer emails, and somehow keep twenty things moving at the same time. We can be very good bosses.
Leadership asks something more of us. It asks us to notice the human being standing in front of us, even when our own day is moving too quickly. It asks us to recognize when we’ve gotten it wrong. And when we do, it asks us to have enough humility to sit across from someone and say, “I hurt you. I was wrong.”
There isn’t a leadership course in the world that can prevent every misstep. I don’t think that’s the goal. The goal is to become the kind of leader who reflects on those moments instead of explaining them away.
Leadership isn’t about never getting it wrong. It’s about what we do after we realize we did.
That conversation happened years ago, but I still think about it. It changed the way I listen and the way I think about the words I use. Most importantly, it reminded me that while I may be moving through a hundred different things in a day, the person standing in front of me may be moving through the one thing that matters most in theirs.
That’s a lesson I couldn’t have learned from a textbook. I had to live it.
Maybe that’s what leadership really is. Not a collection of lessons we’ve mastered, but a willingness to keep allowing the lessons to change us.
Because the standard you live becomes the standard you lead.