Don’t Give Them Hell, Give them Five Minutes

This past weekend, I was sitting with my wife remembering some good times, some less than positive, and the life lessons we’ve collected from them.  One of them seems really poignant today, especially in light of last week’s PRIDE sponsored Work Styles Workshop.  I’ll set the scene for you and then share with you, my own action steps for the next month.

Honestly, I don’t remember the date or time – but the Chicago Tribune does an OK good job of telling the story and gives the date of May 11, 2003.  My wife (Sarah) and I were chaperons for a high school trip to the Museum of Science and Industry where one of the kids on the trip – being a kid, decided to hop up on a banister at the top of a stairwell.  Her momentum carried her over the rail and she fell to her death.  Sarah and I were the first chaperons on the scene and through part of it, became de facto leadership for dealing with the incident.  I’ll spare you the emotions around this (Katie Brooks was one of Sarah’s students), but I do want to share the life lesson that came out of this.

In the course of the day’s ordeal, we worked with two accomplished museum staff who were also dealing with emotional issues of their own (this was the first death in the museum in 90 years).  There in fact were two poignant moments that I still remember to this day.  In one case, a young child, who was unrelated to our group, had been separated from his family.  The museum staff member – Pam – stopped the train of police officers and other public safety individuals she was leading to talk to the child.  In this moment of tragedy and emotional turmoil, she stopped and gave that child time.  She found out that he was lost and personally took him to another museum staff member who could help the child.

Given her role in the organization, responsibility, and clear issue she was dealing with – Pam had the vision to see the child was in distress and stopped everything to help the child.  Given the stress of the situation, it seems actually odd that she would have stopped – by my count there were 5 detectives and 7 uniformed police officers following her, along with some of us associated with the school.  Putting myself in her shoes, I probably wouldn’t have even seen the child, being so focused on the apparently more pressing situation (getting the police to the video surveillance suite so that they could see it was an accident and getting the “crime scene” released).  Pam saw the child and gave him time.

But the child example is too simple and obvious a one.  We all would stop and help a co-worker in distress, wouldn’t we?  What about an obnoxious co-worker?  At an earlier time in the day, not long after the accident, I was accompanying a senior staff member of the museum somewhere when we were accosted by a museum patron.  Another staff member was trying to mollify him – it seemed that he had tried to buy something and “lost a quarter” – and the man was just getting more and more obnoxious.  In my own grief at the moment, I would have been tempted to tell the guy to shut up and go to hell.  Here we were, dealing with the death of a high school kid and all the emotional issues that of course come with that, not to mention trying to do our jobs (legal, public relations, get the other kids on the trip together fed and sequestered from the media, trying to figure out how to tell the other kids (the Chicago Tribune got it wrong – the kids didn’t know that Katie had died until 6 hours later – just before we got back on the buses to head home), get the information back to the school and most importantly to Katie’s parents before they found out via rumors) and this jerk was standing there, demanding 25 cents from the museum.  I wanted to just rail against this guy and instead – George stopped and calmly listened to this man and after hearing a more coherent explanation from this clearly frustrated man (who wanted to buy something and lost his money in the transaction), turned to another staff member and told them to accompany the man to the machine and get him the item.

So – what did I learn from this?  I need to give each of you your 5 minutes.  Face it, we each have deadlines and other stressors that drive us crazy in the office from day to day.  There are days I feel like I have three too many balls in the air and that collapse is imminent unless I just focus on what I’m doing.  Often, those are also the days that one of our group comes by with just one more thing.  Sometimes, they are so stressed out about managing their own set of balls, that they come across like the second museum patron in my story.  Those are the moments that I’m tempted to “give them hell”.  Instead, I’m going to try to give you the time you need to share what is on your plate.  I can only hope that you will do the same for me sometime.

 

Charles Gasper

Director of Evaluation