How Do I Lead When I'm Not in Charge?

By Gloria Feldt | October 13, 2011 |

puzzle-person-keyI get a little nostalgic in October remembering my late parents whose birthdays were this month. So when Bonnie McEwan, president of the public interest communications firm Make Waves, suggested I write about how people in middle management can be leaders, I chuckled to think of one of my father’s favorite sayings:

“Everybody puts their pants on one leg at a time.”

That conjures up amusing pictures that equalize people regardless of their stature in the formal organization chart.

But the question of how to be a leader whether or not you have the formal authority isn’t about cutting others down to size. That famous scene from the 1980 movie 9 to 5 where the secretaries, played to the comedic hilt by Dolly Parton, Lilly Tomlin, and Jane Fonda, tie up their boss and make him beg for mercy. It’s sweet revenge in fantasy, but in reality comes from a place of feeling powerless to influence or lead in any other way…

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Edna St. Vincent Millay, First Woman Pulitzer Poetry Winner

By Gloria Feldt | March 19, 2009 |

My parents started sending me to Mrs. Fred Day’s charmingly named “Expression” classes when I was three years old. There, over a period of seven or eight years, I learned at least one new word each week, practiced exercises intended to improve my posture and diction, was schooled (or at least she tried to school us) in the social graces of serving refreshments to my classmates, and memorized a variety of poems. Some of the lines that have lodged most memorably in my mind are those of Edna St. Vincent Millay. There was the cheery:

I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.

From “Afternoon on a Hill”

…and the dramatic:

All your lovely words are spoken.
Once the ivory box is broken,
Beats the golden bird no more.

From “Elegy”

So when Bonnie McEwan of Make Waves sent me Millay’s poem, “Recuerdo”, along with a note that the poet who liked to call herself “Vincent” and took many lovers during her life, had been the first woman to receive a Pulitzer prize for poetry in 1923, I immediately conjured the sights and floral smells of Mrs. Day’s rather formal home in Temple, Texas–perhaps 3rd Street?–walking distance from my elementary school.

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