I had a long video call with an old friend recently. His name’s Billy and he told me something during the call that moved me deeply. The concept is pan-applicable and not in any way profound, but I found it to be a serious perspective check for me. Here’s the background.
We go back almost three decades and our friendship spans work, theatre, art, and family. I first met Billy twenty-eight years ago when he interviewed me on behalf of the hiring manager for a position at Disney. I remember being irritated by having been handed to an “underling” but that soon passed as it became clear I was in the presence of a sharp intellect and radiant personality with no agenda other than hiring competence. It was during that meeting that I learned my first Billyisms. (e.g., “I’ll probably huck a couple of projects over the transom to you right away.”)
Our recent conversation ranged far and wide, but the preponderance of it centered on our time together at Disney. Early in my tenure there, we both reported directly to Sue, the manager of all marketing-related IT within the Home Video division. Sue had over a hundred direct reports at the time and oversaw several high-visibility projects. To better manage this effort, she moved two key projects to Billy, giving him nearly fifty direct reports. Finding himself in charge of so many people all at once was daunting, so Billy went to see Sue.
“Sue, this is a bit much. How do I manage, drive, and incent so many people?”
“Billy, you actually have to care about each and every one of them.”
Billy explained that at first Sue’s words made the burden weigh even heavier on his shoulders. He later discovered that it had the opposite effect. By caring about the individual talents, needs, and perspectives of his team members, the team coalesced and made the shared burden an order of magnitude lighter.
Billy also discovered that genuine caring solved the drive and incent problem. Sue had a habit of openly preaching gloom and doom on nearly impossible projects. “This one just has too many moving parts. There’s no way we’re going to hit this deadline.” Because Sue did actually care about her people, her people reciprocated and delivered impossible projects on time. I don’t think any of us were fooled by Sue’s tactic, but neither do I think very many of us understood why it always worked. We just knew that none of us wanted to be the one to disappoint her.
I hadn’t thought about any of this in decades, so the words struck me almost like an epiphany: “You actually have to care about all these people.” At sixty-seven years of age, this should not have been coming to me as such a revelation. This is life wisdom that transcends managing one’s own little corner of the workplace. This is how we improve life for all humanity. You actually have to care about people.
I think this is particularly true in our transgender cohort. It continues to surprise me just how factious we are as a community. All of us face the same daily hate and attempts to erase us either by law or innuendo. Nevertheless, every day we see a little gatekeeping here and a little bullying there, enough so it’s easy for our enemies to observe and exploit by spreading discord.
We have the power to change that. We have the power to care about the people in our community in an infinite number of ways. Sometimes it’s as simple as a friendly hello, or a compliment on what someone’s wearing today. It could be keeping a list of the folks who are struggling with one thing or another so that you remember to check in on them once or twice a week. One can’t be everything to all people, but by being a consistently positive presence in people’s lives, that positive presence replicates itself in others and we rise together. It needs to be clear, though, that we actually care about individual people.
I will take this one step further. In our advocacy or even our militancy, we must actually care about the people. I don’t mean just the victims: the trans children in Alabama, the refugees in Ukraine, the people of color denied the right to vote. We must care about the oppressor as well, just not in the same way. We must show through our actions and the way we conduct our lives that we aren’t the monsters we are perceived (or painted) to be. I don’t advocate anyone’s destruction, but I will in my advocacy attempt to perform a spiritual Heimlich maneuver, lovingly applied, to save an individual from choking to death on their own ignorance. We must help the Kay Iveys of the world to understand just how wrong they are not through violence or insult but through grace and care. That’s a tough prescription, but then Jesus Christ didn’t make it easy.[1]
When the pandemic began in early 2020, I began reaching out to a few friends with whom I had not spoken in person for decades. I set up video calls first on the laptop in my office. After a few months, when it became clear that Covid would be staying awhile, we set up a special rig in the dining room so that we could have a weekly call with our children. Then the list of video meetups began to grow. What has been most gratifying is discovering how wise my old friends – not to mention my children –have become. There’s still so much to learn from them if I only take the time to care and listen.
That’s what was so special about my call with Billy. It was somewhat out of the blue and Billy called me. But how wonderful to discover that after all these years, he still had something to teach me too.
What have you learned from an old friend recently? How do you share care in your life?
[1] Note well: I am not a Christian nor do I follow the tenets of any established church or faith. I merely find the words that Jesus Christ spoke to constitute one of several elegant (if challenging) roadmaps for a life-affirming existence.
Erica and Friends 