kitty

Here at the Fulmer house we have two very different cats. I have to be honest, I’m not a cat person, but one of these cats in particular really irks me. Can you guess which one?

The first is Kiwi. Kiwi’s is the picture in the dictionary next to the phrase ‘scaredy-cat.’He is extremely skittish, easily frightened, hates being picked up, and has one squinty eye that flinches at you when you look at him. If you walk towards him, he walks away. If you catch him doing something wrong, he runs away to cower and hide.  And while he generally puts up with my girls’ antics fairly patiently, he is pretty shy towards everyone else.

The second is Lucy. She’s mischievous, fearless and does what she darn well pleases. She’s also smart and has actually figured out how to open doors, drawers and cupboards! She will wake my daughters up at night by getting into their rooms. I had to literally saw off the lever-style door handle to our laundry room just so we could have somewhere to put her and her accomplice at night so she wouldn’t keep waking up the house! She is sneaky, rambunctious, opinionated (yes! Cats can be opinionated!), and if there is cat trouble going on in our house, you can bet Lucy is at the root of it.

So there you have it. Kiwi, the timid scaredy-cat, and Lucy, the bratty rule-breaker.Have you figured out which one irks me?  

Before you guess, I did forget to mention something. Kiwi won’t give me the time of day — he loves my daughters, but for whatever reason, he’s terrified of me. I must have done something long, long ago, to frighten him—though I’ll never know what, he’s never forgotten. He still holds it against me. Lucy, on the other hand, never holds a grudge. It doesn’t matter how many times I correct or challenge her for her mischievious exploits, she’s always ready to purr with affection immediately afterwards. 

Now do you have a guess? You’ve got it, it’s Kiwi who irks me.

See, here’s the deal. I assure you I have never caused any harm to Kiwi or mistreated him in any way, but he refuses to invest in our relationship.  Lucy on the other hand, when caught red-handed in the act of wrongness, looks at me, shrugs and saunters on over to me to purr and be scratched—she breaks the rules, and her apology results in my scratching her. Damn, she’s good!  You see, she owns her mistakes, and takes steps to invest in the relationship, and therein lies the lesson.

Although it might seem silly to get into a cat analogy, I couldn’t help but notice a correlation here: too many leaders hold a grudge, forgetting a crucial distinction between leadership and management.  Someone makes a mistake and these leaders, like Kiwi, never let them forget it. Instead of building a relationship, it’s an eternal stand-off of tension and poor communication. It’s important to remember that we manage tasks, but we lead people.  Put another way, management is working on the business, leadership is working on the people. In the human world, regardless of the tasks that need to be accomplished, underlying all of it is people. And in the immortal lesson of the feline Lucy, the lesson to take away is this: always be working on relationships.

Which do you lead like? Kiwi or Lucy?