B (5:04)
Yeah, yeah, it was. It was really interesting, to be honest with you. I started out, I got hired at Christmas. It was a teacher had retired and I had gone back up to the summer before. I had gone to this school and I'd asked this principal if I could come and coach. I wanted to coach. I wanted to coach football. And she's like, we've already got our coaches. I moved to Fort Worth in August, went there immediately. She's like, we already got our coaches. Call me at Christmas. And I'm thinking, okay. And you know, we didn't have the calendars back then. It was just a big calendar on the desk. This back in the 1900s, where I come from, it's old school. So I literally put a. Put the Friday before Christmas break, I put a note on the calendar. I'm going to call the school and I'm going to talk to her about a football job in the fall, the following fall. And so I call up and she's like, who is this? And you know, she didn't remember me at all. And it's not football season, you know, you told me to call you today. And here's what she said. She said, do you teach? And I said, no, I don't teach. I want to coach. And she says, do you, do you teach biology? And I'm like, I don't teach. I mean, I just told you, I don't, you know. So I'm thinking, I'm hearing a little desperation, this lady. And she says, and then I knew she was in trouble. When she asked the next question. She says, have you taken biology? And I'm like, well, I have taken biology. And she says, I need you to come to my office at 4 o' clock this afternoon when school's out. And I'm like, okay. So I get down there, Erin, and she's got a big orange textbook on the desk and she pushes it across the thing and she says, I don't know you from anybody, but if you'll take it. I've got two sections of 9th grade biology that start in two weeks and it's Christmas break and I can't find a teacher. I really have to have somebody. Would you be willing to teach biology? You think you could? And I'm like, yeah, I think so. I mean, I was working in a. I was working in a mental hospital, which was another story, which was hard, crazy, wild, you know, all that stuff. And I was driving the van for patients. You know, I wasn't qualified to work there either, but I ended up taking this job teaching biology and natural career progression. Yeah, it was just, you know how it is. And so I was the evolution of a career. I was teaching. And I would read the chapter the night before. You know, I'm going in and trying to teach the next day, and I'm just basically a day ahead of these ninth graders. So the lesson, your question is, at the end of the year, it had gone okay. And so they hired me back for the fall. But she pulls me aside and says, you've got to. We've got to have some lesson plans. And there's this deal called a scope and sequence, which I had no idea what that was. I wasn't. Again, I wasn't trained as an educator. So I'm like, okay. And so they explained to me leader development. Basically, the way I think of it now, it's student development, same thing. We want so many people to be leaders, and yet we just. Our training is, if you need something, let me know. And we send them out and we don't teach them how to lead a meeting or build a team or solve problems. There's no. There's literally no scope and sequence to it. And so I learned through that, through that education that you have to. You can't just have random acts of education going on. There's got to be. Think about it this way. If somebody listening has a first grader, they don't send the first grader to the first day of school and expect them to get a trigonometry book. That doesn't happen. They're going to get some numbers in first grade and then they'll learn to count and they'll add them up and subtract them and they'll get the times tables in third grade and maybe some algebra, fractions, whatever along the way. And I never made it to trig, but you can make it. You just don't start there. And I think sometimes we think leaders are, you know, we put them in a leadership position and just we hope they're going to know what to do. And if we don't train them specifically, you know, and sequentially, we really are going to. We're going to. We're going to set them up to fail. And so we find this everywhere. And so I learned a lot of what we do now. You know, we've created this operating system. Mark Miller and I have, through our Lead Every Day book, we've created an operating system. It's basically just a scope and sequence for leader development. How to become a better leader, how to strengthen your organization ultimately, but improve team performance along the way. And so all that holistically is a lot of it goes back to my education. Background of learning that you can't just have random stuff. You've got to have a sequential way to do. Do training and development. I think so many organizations just hope they'll end up with leaders because they talk about leadership or they give people a book and it just doesn't work because they don't have that process. So that's. That all goes back to that education.
