Over the last couple of days, I've been thinking about how I relate to groups or organizations.
Of course this story is partly true, or I would never have concocted it in the first place. But it is not the whole truth. A number of recent experiences have made this clear to me.
Case One
Two nights ago (Thursday), I joined an online meeting of the leadership for the local Region of the professional society that I belong to. There are plenty of reasons I needn't have bothered. In the first place, I'm not even working any more. I joined the professional society two or three years before my local office closed. As you recall, I never found another job after that. I've been volunteering with this society as a way to keep busy, more than anything else.
Also, I'm only in leadership in the most tenuous way. I was Chair of the local section for four-and-a-half years. (There's a rule in the society that limits you to two years, but, well, stuff happened.) But I was able to resign my Chair-ship at the end of last year. Fawn, whom I recruited to join our leadership committee as Program Chair, took over as the new Chair on January 1 of this year. I accepted a minimal role in the leadership committee because Fawn asked me to be available, to give her advice. And that minimal role means that I am invited to the monthly meeting of all the Regional leadership, because they want to make sure that there is at least one representative from each section. In case the Chair can't make it, someone else should still be there to report.
Fawn has made it to these meetings very reliably, all year. But still I show up whenever I don't have a conflict.
That's the first interesting question: Why do I bother?
The second interesting point—and this is what started me ruminating on the subject—is how other people in the meeting treat me. Of course they are used to seeing me. I showed up for these meetings for four-and-a-half years as Chair of my local section. My attendance at these meetings has now overlapped with the tenure of three different Regional Directors. I also notice that—despite the term limits—there are a few names that I keep seeing, year after year. I guess they must have rotated into new roles or job titles (as have I). But they keep representing their sections in these meetings. It's interesting.
But the moment that struck me, in the meeting two evenings ago, was when one of the long-time representatives (used to be Chair of his section, I think now he is Treasurer) started joking with me in a very obvious way, the way two old veterans might kid each other over long shared experience. Of course in the moment I responded by rocking back in my chair and laughing—we were on Zoom, after all, and I had my camera on so people could see my reaction. But in the back of my mind I wondered: If I am genuinely shy and introverted, how did I get into this position? I keep trying to avoid having to do hard work for this society, so how did I become a veteran that this man feels comfortable joking with?
That started me mulling. Then the next afternoon I acquired more data.
Case Two
The very next afternoon (Friday), the leadership committee for our local section (of the same professional society) met remotely, to start sketching out our business plan for 2027. Again, my nominal role in our section leadership is small. And I keep hoping that maybe I can drop entirely out of the leadership at the end of the year, so that nobody will notice if I drop out of the society as a whole the next time my membership comes up for renewal.
But somehow I had to interject myself into the conversation periodically to keep us moving forward, and to keep us from getting tangled up in trivia. Also, it's a little precious of me to pretend I am trying to back out of a leadership role, considering that I have a weekly phone call with Fawn—every Sunday morning, like clockwork—to discuss what we need to do in our section. She and I set up these calls at the beginning of last year, when I was still Chair and she was Program Chair. They have continued this year, when she is Chair and I have a negligible role ... negligible on paper, at any rate. In fact, these calls mean that Fawn and I discuss the actions of our section more often than anyone else (so far as I know). In practice, I think the two of us are in charge, formal roles be damned. So what does it say about my relationship to organizations, that I am still driving our local section without portfolio, and that I still intervene regularly to keep meetings on track?
It's an interesting question.
Case Three
As soon as I logged off from Friday's section leadership call (see above, as "Case Two"), I had my weekly call with Debbie. And rather than just trading news, there were a couple of specific things she wanted to discuss with me.
I'm going to visit her in a couple of weeks, partly just to visit and partly to attend this retreat that we also attended last year and the year before. She had some concrete questions about renting a car for the week that I'll be there.
Someone we don't know emailed our Sangha out of the blue to ask for money. Debbie was uncomfortable with the request, but wanted to discuss it with me before replying. Then she replied in both our names. (Wait, what?)
For that matter, I've mentioned that she wants to establish a Care Taking Council for our Sangha, and that I was on the committee to establish ground rules for what that Council should do. We met for a few months and finally came up with a document that the Sangha approved. (This was back in the spring some time.) The next step was to identify people who wanted to serve on the Council. At first, I had no special desire for a leadership role, and I told Debbie so. She disagreed with me, but so softly and so gently that I could never call it an argument. But we talked and talked ... and talked ... until she worked me around to seeing that I might have something to contribute after all. I said I didn't have any strong sense of anything that I wanted to change about the Sangha, and she said that perspective in itself is valuable ... to understand what is actually good about the status quo, so that we don't pitch it overboard heedlessly. We still haven't gotten to the point of establishing the Council yet, but I submitted my application months ago.
So again, I found myself trying to understand. What does Debbie see in me, that she thinks my counsel is so valuable? Is it just that she is emotionally besotted because we were involved thirteen years ago? I don't think that's it. (If nothing else, remember that she's the one who broke up with me. Also, it has been a really long time.)
But if she's not looking at me through rose-colored goggles, then what does she see in me? A simple story about shyness and introversion doesn't explain all these data points.
And so I puzzled.
A first answer
This evening I went out for a walk before dinner, and I came up with a first answer to the question. I don't know if this is an adequate answer. I'm pretty sure that it's true as far as it goes, but I don't know if it goes far enough. Still, it's a start.
I have often said, when talking about my professional career, that I never had the best technical skills in my field. There were other people in my department, or in my line of work, who had been in the field longer or who had gotten formal training that I lacked. So whatever success I had was not based on my technical brilliance.
What then? There might be more than one answer, but I think part of it was that I was able to establish a personal connection with people in other departments that had to work with me. When I showed up in an office or a plant that was part of our business unit but not my home location, people regularly waved at me. "Hi, Hosea!" Then sometimes they would add, with a forced giggle, "You aren't coming to see me today, are you?" That is to say, they knew that if I showed up in their work area, it was going to mean more work for them. But on a personal level, they were still happy to see me. And in fact, while I knew that my presence was going to make more work for everyone else in the building, I worked hard to narrow what I asked from them as far as possible, focusing it so that it made sense to them and they could see the value in doing it. Yes, in one sense I represented an obnoxious extra burden, forced on them because Somebody in Corporate HQ Said So. But I tried hard to show how the things I asked them for would benefit them as well. I tried to see their point of view. And that made a difference in how they reacted to me.
It didn't work with everyone. I could never align with the guy in charge of Purchasing, or the woman in charge of Human Resources. But the rank and file employees, the ones working on the floor? We always got along very well.
And where, in all of this, have my shyness and introversion gotten to? Of course they are still real. Of course they are still there, somehow. But they are not the whole story. Part of the answer may be that, just as in my professional work, I can make personal connections with people. Then I can use those connections as levers, to try to make things better.
So the story I tell myself so often is at best a half-truth, and it's not even the most important half. I need to remember the rest.
Also, maybe it would do me some good to get the hell out of my apartment from time to time, to get involved in more activities, and to make some new friends. What a concept, huh?
Postscript:
For more on this same topic, see also discussions of "the Tanatu charisma" or of what games I used to play as a child.
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