Sometimes you have to let the ball go by

In preparation for our women’s leadership conference in June, here’s what another group did to promote women as leaders.

Once when I was younger, I publicly ditched a girl friend, so I could spend time alone with a guy who had dumped me a year earlier. I wish I could say it was when I was 12, but I was 22 at the time, a college graduate and a feminist—sorta.

I’m confessing this now, because after spending three days at the Women’s Foodservice Forum’s annual event in Dallas, I’m ashamed of my lack of sisterly solidarity all those many years before.

In spite of myself, I succeeded in raising two daughters to be strong, outspoken women. I wish I would have had their self-confidence at their age. I did have a strong role model in my mother, who constantly reinvented herself, learning new roles, new skills. She once told me she was a late bloomer; I hope I can bloom as many times as she did.

I don’t think you can attend the sessions at the WFF conference and not come away thinking you can move mountains. Of course, once you see the mountain of unfinished work waiting for you on your desk, that euphoria is severely tested.

One session I attended had us partnering with the person next to us for exercises. I really hate “party games,” because I stink at them. Our instructions were that one of us would make a fist and the other person had to open it. I assumed the purpose of the exercise was to keep my partner from opening my fist, so I held it closed with the determination of a mother dog protecting her litter, as my partner viciously tried to pry it open with all her strength. It hurt like hell, but I persevered, only to find that the “correct” response was to simply ask the other person to open her fist. What fun is that?

Another exercise tested how observant we were. After studying our partner, we turned our backs and had to change three things about ourselves. We all went for the obvious things: take off one earring, turn our name badges over, take off our jackets. Once we guessed correctly, the speaker told us to now change three different things. I took off my shoes, removed my name badge and put my watch on the other wrist. “Now, change three more things,” we were told. My partner and I looked at each other and sighed, but since we’re team players, we turned around and changed three more things—twice more. I was fixated on changing accessories or clothing, before I realized that once again there was a trick to this. The things we changed didn’t have to be tangible, it could be our facial expressions, our posture, our body language. The lesson was that in order to be creative we need to think past the obvious answers. (Actually, my partner and I weren’t team players after all, we spent the time creatively chatting instead of participating.)

I did glean some valuable information in the workshops, but actually more inspirational than the motivational messages are the women you meet. Publisher Mary Jo Larson always promises to go and then ditches me for her kids, who have spring break about the same time. (Now why is it OK to ditch a friend for your kids, but not a guy?) I have to admit, it’s much more intimidating to walk alone into a room full of women you don’t know, than it is to walk into a room full of men you don’t know.

I’m ready to make plans to attend the 2007 conference in Orlando, and you can bet I won’t spend the next year working on changing three things about myself, but on seeing if I can change the date of Mary Jo’s kids’ spring break.


Here are a few of the takeaways the speakers gave us:

• Leadership is all about knowing what people are thinking. Get into their heads, instead of assuming you know what they’re thinking—or thinking for them.

• You must play the game on the field you have, not on the one you wish you had.

• The No. 1 leadership challenge is to keep people inspired—and to inspire them to be better than themselves, not better than the person working next to them.

• The diagnosis must precede the prescription (don’t try to treat a problem you don’t know the cause of).

• The No. 1 reason people leave jobs is a lack of a relationship with their supervisor.

• You teach people how to treat you by how you communicate.

• Watch what you say in e-mail messages. The recipients can put any tone they want on the message, no matter how innocuous you try to make it. While e-mail is a quick way to communicate, sometimes a phone call can eliminate all the back and forth messages, plus save you sounding ticked, when you’re not.

• Laughing is internal jogging. If you don’t laugh daily, air gets trapped in your body and expands your hips.


Crow—it tastes gr-r-reat!

As a former English major, I love irony. I once told that to my husband and he got excited thinking I said “ironing”—which in itself is ironic. My latest irony spotting was at the WFF’s leadership conference where one of the giveaways was an exercise CD by fitness guru Kathy Smith, a high school friend of mine.

OK, so she was more like a high school acquaintance. What I remember about her was the time some creepy boy wrote on the blackboard: “Kathy S’ bra died of starvation.” That certainly wasn’t the case once Kathy discovered exercise.

I had forgotten all about Kathy and high school until the day I walked into my son’s room when he was 12 and he had just hung a poster of Kathy in a skimpy exercise outfit next to his baseball posters.

“Hey, where’d you get that?” I asked. Zack was ready to defend his constitutional rights to decorate his room as he saw fit, when I gushed, “Kathy Smith and I went to high school together. That’s so cool that you have her poster.”

As Ed and I left the room, he asked incredulously, “You two are the same age?” What he meant to say was “same species,” but to his credit he caught himself in time. I didn’t think I could be any more insulted until I returned to Zack’s room the next day and found Kathy wadded up and stuffed in the trash.

So if Kellogg’s, the sponsor of the CD, thinks walking with Kathy Smith is going to make me buy their cereal, they’ve wasted their marketing dollars. I’m a big-time serial grudge holder.