Influence Beyond the Institution

Time provides us with distance from adversities, adversities that often seem monumental in the moment. Those same adversities, when viewed through a lens of time, end up being relatively insignificant in our bigger picture. That’s absolutely the case when I look back on that 2017 event. Our entire cost structure for hosting it - the venue, the licensing, the materials, the food, etc. - was barely 50% of just our food costs for a few of the events we’ve hosted over the last few years, and that was just one line item.

I’ve already commented on how our relationship with Dr. Rob Walker and his team administering the Jobs for Veterans State Grant across Virginia deepened in spite of the hurdles we faced in the fall of 2017 so I won’t take you back down that path. If that were the only seed of equal or greater benefit, the juice would have been more than worth the squeeze; it most certainly was not the only seed, though.

Like so many of the adversities Cindy and I worked through leading up to it, this particular experience offered us the amazing opportunity of locking arms together against when felt like an insurmountable foe. And at the time, it was indeed the biggest we had faced. In this case, though, we were facing this foe through a business bearing our name. Standing on the values we held most dear, values we hadn’t even listed or defined at that point, not only gave us the courage we’d need to press forward, it also pulled us together around a vision we were still forming for what our business could someday look like.

While I frequently allude to it in passing, I don’t often explain something in detail. There’s still more than a little bit of unbridled redneck left in me. I’ve learned to squelch it over the years, largely with Cindy’s support and watchful eye, but some scenarios bring it out more than others. The non-compete listed in the fine print on the final page of that contract and how things unfolded in the weeks that followed proved to test my restraint as much as anything. I would have enjoyed few things more than calling the folks involved out publicly. Cindy advised me against that, and she was absolutely correct. I could have made a gigantic stink about it, and I wouldn’t have been wrong, but that would have pulled us away from the goal we were working to achieve. And while doing that wouldn’t have gone against any of our stated values - then or now - there’s a kind of influence that’s earned through quiet strength that just doesn’t come through making a stink, even when that stink is accurate and well placed.

Late in What’s KILLING Your Profitability? I shared a powerful lesson Terry Ward taught me and the behavior-based safety steering team: control what you can control. The more time and energy we put into things that are ultimately outside of our control, the more opportunities we forfeit. We all have limited resources, wasting them on things that don’t move us toward our desired goal is futile at best - and often just plain dumb. By quietly pushing through, focusing on the things that were within our control, Cindy and I earned influence beyond that single institution. That influence, coupled with all the other lessons we learned through that experience, has served us well ever since. And those seeds have continued to flourish. 

Pivoting through institutional battles builds authentic relational power; consistency in conflict earns trust no system can grant. The real question lies in whether we’re able to routinely identify the seeds from each adversity we face and nurture them into the equal or greater benefit they contain. If we learn to use those adversities to develop systems for finding those seeds, built in alignment with our values, we stand a much better chance for seeing those seeds grow. We’ll look at that next. First, though, take the time to share a small piece of your own advocacy story with someone you trust, and be sure to detail the ripples you’ve seen since.