“Only the strong survive”, sang Jerry Butler on his 1968 album The Ice Man Cometh; “Only the strong survive”, sang Billy Paul in 1977; “Only the strong survive”, sang Rod Stewart in 2009; “Only the strong survive”, Bruce Springstein entitled his 2022 album.
It seems, however, that this is a quote without a quotee, an axiom without an anchor, an idiom without an id. If you were pushed, you might say the origin of this species was an uttering of Charles Darwin but in his wheelhouse it was the fittest and not the strongest who were the most likely to survive. Probably he wasn’t thinking about spandex, protein shakes and Pure Fitness when he offered this assessment – more likely what he was referring to was the fitness of a species to adapt.
There may be exceptions to this rule – if cockroaches and earwigs really do have the ability to survive nuclear holocaust, for them it’s probably OK just continuing on the creepy crawly path to ultimate fulfilment. For the rest of us, attempting to adapt to the gyroscopic maze that passes in front of our eyes every day is probably a safer bet.
It’s very hard to feel sympathy for the President of the Spanish Football association and his ilk (for example the President of FIFA), but if you forced yourself to be generous, you might find it within you to admit that it is difficult, in 2023, to know who it is you’re supposed to be.
The last few months, for me, have felt as if they were the final throes in a right of passage from the world of full time employment, through the land of portfolio and into a new place which is…well, just being me. I’ve written before about the anxiety that I felt in anticipation of becoming ‘an ordinary person’ after stepping away from being a Head of Schools. Of course that was a confused projection (as anxieties always are) because I’d muddled being a person with doing a job. It turns out that I’m the same person that I always was, minus the purple cloak of status. Frankly, it’s a lot cooler without it and I sleep better.
Vulcan’s final test for me (I really hope), which has roasted me to the very edge of vaporisation over the past 7 months, has been to manage a renovation project on our new apartment. If I say that we are into the 8th month of a 2 month project, you’ll get the idea. I wasn’t worried about it at the outset, I’ve managed many large scale school building projects, heavens there’s even a whole school block named after me in Portishead. So I approached this enterprise with the assured and blasé confidence of a seasoned project manager.
It turns out things are different when you don’t have a multi-million pound/dollar budget behind you, or a project team, and when you’re spending your own money faster than an aortic haemorrhage.
Very quickly, I had to confront what sort of character I was going to play in this money soaked tragedy. Should I play the victim, railing at the gods for making my life so expensively miserable? Or should I be what we used to call in Hong Kong ‘angry gweilo’ – trying to shout and bully my way through the mistakes, the oversights, the downright lies we were told about deadlines, deliveries, designs, suppliers, EU legislation, customs and so on and so on? Or should I be the compromising conciliator, making the best of some very bad jobs and overlooking the fact that they had all gone wrong on our hard earned time and money?
As it is for testosterone saturated old football men in 2023, so it became for me. Who was I supposed to be? What was expected of me? What really mattered – getting every tiny detail right or getting the job done? What price compromise?
There is learning in everything if you choose to find it. Slowly, it dawned upon me that I would find the best in the legions of artisans and grafters (and throw in a couple of grifters to that basket) who marched through our wrecked apartment leaving trails of clipped wires, shoe prints of plasterboard dust, forests of empty boxes and a sprinkling of not very discretely discarded fag ends…I could find the best if in each of them, if I found the human being.
Previously, this is what I had called ‘good leadership’ and it hadn’t really occurred to me that I should ‘lead’ a project that I had paid others to do for me. After a school career during which I regularly told people that they didn’t need positional leadership to be leaders, I’d fallen into that very mindset. This isn’t fair, I’m not in charge, I’m not paid to do this, I’m paying your wages. If you choose this role, you pay the price with impotence, bitterness and regret.
16-year-old Emmy Somauroo didn’t take this route when she started her successful petition to force Nike into producing Mary Earps replica goalkeeper jerseys. Without any positional authority to influence, she took a lead, launched a petition for something she believed in and forced the hand of a corporate giant. She wasn’t the only person who felt this way (including Mary Earps) – she was just the only person who did something about it.
My learning, then, is that leadership and life are not two different things. I discovered that if I took time to find out that the plumber is quite shy, not at all surly as he first appeared; if I took time to understand that the carpenter had two funny daughters and a wife who worked in a primary school; if I chatted to the electrician about how he was the best in his class at maths in school but liked to party; if I listened to the boss whose son was struggling with ADHD; if I did this instead of raging against the machine, then I got more of what I wanted.
Manipulative? I’m honestly not sure. There have been times when I wanted to shout (and two when I did). Waiting three months for two planks of wood for our bathrooms to fly from Turkey to London was too much. Having first the kitchen company and then the contractors themselves file for liquidation was a test that Sisyphus might have passed on.
But it has been relentlessly true that I have achieved more, kept oil flowing to the grinding gears and felt better about myself when I’ve persisted with polite resilience than when I’ve submitted to the various unedifying incarnations of my inner child.
Proteus was a sea god (the old man of the sea) who could not only change his form at will but who also knew the future. To hear the truths of Proteus, the challenge was to capture him, because he would not speak unless he had been restrained. Leaders must be shape changers and any leader who cannot appear to their followers in a guise that will make those people feel relaxed and trusting, is destined for a short and fractious career. We all carry different archetypes within us, different manifestations of ourselves with different linguistic and moral taxonomies. We are all shape changers, all proteans, by nature. We swing seamlessly from these different inner identities as we move from work to home to parents to school friends to love interests and so on, without even being aware of it. It’s when we get stuck up one tree, with one operating system which we expect the world to adapt to, that we find ourselves with serious problems (in coaching I hear this all the time, it’s just the way I am…’).
So, mixing my Greeks and my Romans, I thank Vulcan (live long and prosper) for taking me to a hot place where I was able to corner Proteus, just for a moment. He helped me to understand that to live is to lead and whether you are being paid for that, or whether you are paying for the privilege, if you don’t work at it, you don’t get what you want.
