Examples of Humility in Leadership From Mayberry
I hope you’ll enjoy this guest post by Isaac Vogel of Roell Painting Company as much as I did. What humble leaders (fictional or real) inspire you?
Growing up in central South Dakota, because there’s no real “local team” to speak of, cable television informed my rooting interest as much as anything, and thanks to Ted Turner’s TBS Superstation (and my dad’s affinity for Henry Aaron), I was born into Atlanta Braves fandom. In advance of every game, TBS played reruns of “The Andy Griffith Show.”
While the catchy whistling melody of the theme song stayed with me all these years, there wasn’t much I remembered about the show itself — other than wanting the episode to end so I could watch the Braves game. But now, nearly 30 years later, streaming video has largely usurped cable television, and “The Andy Griffith Show” is available in its entirety on Netflix. Spurred on by nostalgia more than anything, I decided to watch an episode not long ago. I haven’t stopped watching since.
In many ways, I’m still the kid who impatiently waits for the Braves game to start. I’m still the kid who has a lot to learn about how the world works. Little did I know at the time, but I could have learned some pretty good life lessons had I just paid a little more attention to Andy Griffith back then.
If you’re not familiar with the show, it’s set in the small southern town of Mayberry, and the plot centers largely around the town sheriff, Andy Taylor (Andy Griffith), and his deputy, Barney Fife (Don Knotts). Andy is wise, caring, thoughtful, and most of all, humble. Conversely, Barney is high strung, nervous, overconfident (to put it mildly), and the poster child for overcompensation. In many of the episodes, Barney, in all his earnestness, botches something up, only to have Andy come and save the day. Whether it’s locking himself in a jail cell repeatedly, singing grossly off key in the town choir festival, or letting a wanted criminal go loose, Barney and failure seem to go hand in hand. While this schtick generated countless laughs over the years, and many for me in the last half year or so, it’s also teaching me a lot about what real leadership looks like.
Most days I am a lot more like Deputy Fife than I am Sheriff Taylor. I’m high strung, I am worried about what others think, and in an effort to gain their approval or impress them (earnest as I may be), I end up pretending to be more confident than I really am. I overcompensate then feel self-conscious. I take too much credit when I succeed, and I have a tendency to blame others when I fail. Thankfully, though, I’ve had a few Sheriff Taylors in my life, especially in the last year. Just like Barney, I’ve messed up a lot of things something fierce, and I’ve been surrounded by lots of wonderful people who not only held me up, but helped me come up roses when I certainly deserved to come up thorns.
Maybe leadership isn’t so much about showing people how put together or competent we are so much as it is showing others how competent they are, or how exceptional they are capable of being. Maybe it’s not so much about teaching others to lead like we do (which is especially tempting if you are a successful leader), as much as it’s encouraging others to lead as themselves. Maybe leadership has less to do with power and so much more to do with empowerment.
Humble leadership takes some courage. It takes some vulnerability. It takes patience. And it takes faith. It takes some courage to place the well-being of others, both professional and personal, above your own. (What if something goes wrong?!) It takes vulnerability to concede that our way, even when it works, may not be the best or only way. It takes patience to let people find their own way, even if it means we don’t get exactly what we want now, or maybe ever. And it takes faith. It takes faith to let our children, our employees, or whomever, lock themselves in a jail cell, let the convict loose, or sing way off key. It takes faith to truly believe things will still work out. And they won’t work out because we wielded our power, or influence, or expertise, but because we quietly observed, helped where we could, and ensured that when things did work out, we took none of the credit.
Because of his proclivity for folly (and the fact that he literally shot himself in the foot on more than one occasion), Barney carried an unloaded gun in his holster and a single bullet in his breast pocket. Most days I’m like Barney. Eager to prove myself, eager to succeed, and yet always one false move away from shooting myself in the foot.
And most days I need people like Andy around. In all his years as sheriff of Mayberry, I don’t recall one instance where Andy shot himself in the foot or came down on Barney when he did. You know what his secret was?
Sheriff Andy Taylor didn’t even carry a gun.
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