Leadership Lessons from an Adoption: Navigating Scars

Expanding our family through an international adoption has shaped our last three years.  The journey began in December 2009 and in March of 2012 we brought two sisters, Meskerem and Tarikua, to Austin from Ethiopia and into our home.  The adventure continues and the voyage has provided poignant lessons; some of them even apply to leadership. 

Navigating Scars – The return flight from Addis to Austin may not be the longest flight in the world but it is close. Addis to DC is the first leg.  Wheels up at 10PM, which puts you at the airport at about 8PM.  Better eat before that, as there is no McDonalds at Bole Airport.  You land at Fiumicino at 3AM for fuel and then arrive at Dulles in DC the next morning, a short 17 hours in a metal tube.  Wind your way through immigration and customs to an empty airport and sit in the Admiral's Club for about an hour waiting for the next leg to Dallas followed by a short hop into Austin Texas.  All in, counting airport time, it is about 28 hours en-route.  Try that on your first ever plane ride.

The trip started with the girls’ first ride on an escalator, which was a doppelganger for a scene from The Lost Boys of Sudan.  It ended through the back door of our house with a welcome by the family Labradoodle, Copper and then all hell broke loose…let me fill in the gaps.  Children are scared of dogs in Ethiopia, in Addis alone there are an estimated 250,000 stray dogs and our youngest daughter has scars on her back that until a few weeks into her arrival at our house were a mystery.  Sense a slow motion train wreck?

When sweet Copper wiggled up to Tarikua, my daughter became terrified and climbed up me like a pacific islander scaling a palm tree.  This surprised us as we knew about the dog terrors and had spent time showing the girls pictures of our dog and watched both girls hug and kiss the picture.  What was going on?  I attributed it to nerves and kept trying to press Tarikua to be next to our dog so she could see Copper was no threat.  For some reason this was an accelerant to her terror and for 72 hours her feet did not touch the ground if Copper circled.

About three to four weeks into the girls’ American journey my older daughter Meskerem strung together enough English to tell us the story about Tarikua’s scars.  It seems that at some point a couple of years ago, the girls were playing and a wild dog crashed through the underbrush.  The kids ran, except Tarikua tripped and the dog attacked her.  She tucked into the Pillbug position defending against the mini Cujo.  The dagger in my heart?  The dog that attacked Tarikua was the same color as our dog Copper.  As Paul Harvey would say, “Now I knew the rest of story”

Cormac McCarthy wrote, “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”  The moment I learned of the copper colored attack I understood a past.  As leaders we sometimes ask our folks to do something logical and doable but they do not move or they scamper up the palm tree to safety.  Before we write them off as incapable we should take the time to look for scars.  It may just be that we have to help them navigate their scars to get them to where they want to be.

Leadership Lessons from an Adoption: Stimson’s Sagacity

Expanding our family through an international adoption has shaped our last three years.  The journey began in December 2009 and in March of 2012 we brought two sisters, Meskerem and Tarikua, to Austin from Ethiopia and into our home.  The adventure continues and the expedition has provided poignant lessons; some of them even apply to leadership. 

Stimson’s Sagacity: On April 4^th, 2012 I walked my oldest daughter into Bridge Point Elementary School.  I was feeling guilty.  Since our kids go to public school and Meskerem is my daughter the school could not say ‘no’.  At this point the girls were about six weeks in the States and their vocabulary was only up to about 50 words; this was clearly not going to be your normal ESL situation.  I had my English: Amharic Cheat Sheet prepared for the teachers; they all had my mobile number in hand.  But I still felt remorseful, like I was dumping a decision my wife and I made upon a decidedly non-volunteer army.

I could not have been more wrong about the situation. 

I walked into the main office area to check Meskerem in for the first time and by coincidence most of the school’s leadership team was there, “Meskerem, we have been waiting for you!”  There were five adults in the room and they were bursting with joy.  But it was a unique joy…a joy I did not recall seeing prior to this moment.  I am sure you’ve had moments when you were happy for someone else, “I am so happy you won the business!”  Or you’ve also experienced happiness when someone did something for you, “Wow – that was so nice of you, that makes me so happy!”

But this was different; they were filled with joy based upon the part they were going to play in the restoration of an orphan.  They were getting to do what they were trained to do, what they love to do and see it make an incredible, indelible mark on someone’s life.  It was an inner joy that they could not contain.

Henry Stimson, Secretary of War under President Taft and FDR said, “The chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him”

People will rise up or sink down to our level of expectation in them.  I am an optimist and believe that the 96% of humanity who are not sociopathic want to work hard and do the right thing.  But there, in that school office on that date in April, I underestimated the staff at my daughter’s school.   I thought I was handing them work; they believed they had been given a gift.

Don’t deny someone the opportunity to do something great.  One great lesson in this adventure is that work is not a four-letter word if someone is convinced that what he or she does makes a difference and they have the opportunity to be proud of their work.

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.” ― Mark Twain

Leadership Lessons from an Adoption: Stockdale Paradox

Expanding our family through an international adoption has shaped our last three years.  The journey began in December 2009 and in March of 2012 we brought two sisters, Meskerem and Tarikua, to Austin from Ethiopia and into our home.  The adventure continues and the expedition has provided poignant lessons; some of them even apply to leadership. 

Stockdale Paradox:  A great friend and former boss Chip Nemesi had many truisms; one that always stuck with me was “You can’t learn to swim in the front yard”

The agency we used for the adoption insisted that we pursue the adoption in a manner consist with the Hague Adoption Convention even though Ethiopia has not ratified this treaty.  This meant quite a bit of on-line education, books to read and counseling from very gifted social workers.  All of the pre-work instilled in me a belief that we were ready, but in reality we were just doing the butterfly stroke in the tall grass.

One can read all the material they want and then they are face to face with two young children aged 5 and 9 from rural Ethiopia with no English, no real concept of indoor plumbing and an ability to look at a fork as if it was some sort of mystical ancient Jedi talisman.  Mix that in with a couple of American boys and all hell broke loose. 

Napolean said, “A leader is a dealer in hope” The leader’s job is to paint a picture of a better future but how do you bring hope into difficult situations?  In  Good to Great, Jim Collins writes about a conversation he had with Admiral James Stockdale regarding his time in the Vietnamese POW camp. “I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

When Collins asked who didn't make it out of Vietnam, Stockdale replied, “Oh, that's easy, the optimists. They were the ones who said, 'We're going to be out by Christmas.' And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they'd say, 'We're going to be out by Easter.' And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

Stockdale then added, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end - which you can never afford to lose - with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

See the truth, but not for worse than it is.  One great lesson in this adventure is that we were always be prepared to give an answer to anyone who asks the reason for the hope that we had…but it was hope grounded in the reality of the moment.  

“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.” - Emily Dickinson