Welcome to my first blog of 2020! My goal this year is to have more consistency with my writing and that means publishing my blog weekly. Embarrassingly, it has been almost six months since my last post. It was from a series entitled Leadership Lessons from 80s TV. Since then, I’ve had a lot of folks (OK…two…two folks) ask me why I chose that topic. The answer is easy. It’s because 80s TV helped shape me during my younger, more formative years. In fact, it was part of my Big Four: Family, Church, School, and 80s TV.
While I dissected different TV shows in my last series, the theme always remained the same. And it’s a theme that today’s best leaders and customer service champions live out on a daily basis. And the theme is this: “It’s not my fault, but it is my problem.”
Allow me to explain what I mean by this. Every 80s action TV show I watched would inevitably include a scene where the hero had the choice of taking on more than his or her fair share of life’s load. Looking the other way would have been easily justifiable, but it never happened.
World Class Private Investigator, Thomas Magnum, would run into an elderly widow who couldn’t pay for his services, but still desperately needed them. Street tough, Sgt. Rick Hunter would encounter a prostitute who was being beat up by her pimp, but fell outside of his current police caseload. The incomparable A Team would become aware of a gang selling drugs to neighborhood kids, but conflicted with their schedule of staying one step ahead of Colonel Decker and the U.S. Military Police. And the courageous team of Michael Knight and KITT would consistently be tapped to help save the world by others than their employer, Knight Industries.
And I never remember an episode of any these leaders not helping. I never heard, “I’d love to help, I just don’t have the time.” Or “I’ve got enough troubles of my own…good luck!” No, once any of our heroes were made aware of a wrongdoing, it became their problem. It wasn’t their fault, but it was now their problem. And they believed it was up to them to fix it.
Please don’t misread this. None of these leading men or women went looking for these problems. Nobody was sticking his or her nose in someone else’s business. These were issues that were brought to them. And once they were made aware of a miscarriage of justice, they owned finding a solution.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we tried living by that same theme? “It’s not my fault, but it is my problem.” What would the world look like if everyone lived this out? It could be as simple as giving a homeless person a sandwich or volunteering at a local soup kitchen or becoming a mentor to a youth in need.
The world changes one good deed at a time. I hope 2020 brings lots and lots of problems your way…and lots and lots of opportunities to help fix them.
Well said Mr. Foreman! We can learn so many things from the problems we encounter and many of those lessons can be applied to help others in our life.