Stolen Responsibility

In High School and College, I worked at a summer camp. I love the way that camp can get kids out of their comfortable life environments and expose them to new experiences and open their eyes to evaluation and life change.

One summer, my area of responsibility was leading the backpack guides. It was a fun team of young men and women who loved the outdoors and, I came to discover, loved playing tricks on one another.

If you are a prankster, you know that there are some classic pranks that fall into specific genres. The tofurkey genre of tricks involves the switch out. Where someone does something or eats something that is very different from what was expected. It looked like turkey, it was served at Thanksgiving, but we all came to realize it was something very different…

This was the favorite genre for the backpack guides and would typically play out as someone would come off the trail and find items added to their packs. Sometimes it would be a rock, other times it would be the gear of another guide. The biggest surprise came when a guide finished his 7 mile hike with a group of middle schoolers and found a whole watermelon in his backpack. How he didn’t know that was there, is still a mystery to me.

As leaders we are susceptible to carrying things that don’t belong to us.

If you are anything like me, I find myself sitting in a meeting, agreeing on action points and determining who will take what items and then a few days later I begin taking the items out of other’s backpacks and putting them in mine. Sometimes I do this thinking that I am lightening their burden; sometimes it is a lack of trust in a team member; sometimes it is so I can feel important or significant, but the reality is, the team member doesn’t usually know that I took something out of their pack! So the weight they presume they are carrying remains the same and yet my pack become heavier. Talk about inefficiency!! If we were to empty out our packs at the end of trail, we would find that we are both carrying the same thing.

Friday is trash day. My oldest son is responsible for taking our trash cans to the street on Thursday night. Every Thursday night I take something out of his pack when I remind him to take the trash cans down. Should I be surprised when he realizes that he isn’t really responsible for taking the trash cans out, he is only responsible for responding to my inquiry about the status of the trash cans. You know a good word to describe that: enabling.

From the outside it looks like I am “encouraging accountability” and “trusting but verifying”, but on the inside it becomes removing responsibility. So when I get frustrated that I have to “remind” him every week, I have no one to blame but myself. I’ve taken that out of his pack. Enabling can give the appearance of care and accountability, while covering a distrustful and controlling heart.

The question to consider:

What have I picked up that doesn’t belong to me?

Now the harder part. Once you realize that you have taken something that don’t belong to you, you need to give it back. The weight of leadership is too heavy to also be carrying around stolen goods.