All the great advantages of being a leader

Build great career paths for employees
Provided training and development supporting career paths
Assist in removing barriers to successful employee performance
Design meaningful and challenging work assignments
Sponsor laterals and promotions when employees are ready
Provide recognition for small and large accomplishments
Use of influence to place round pegs in round holes
Lead by example: values, integrity, work ethic
Show them that humor is important

Being a great leader – it is like the famous quote from the teacher turned astronaut, Christa McAuliffe who was killed in a space launch, “I touch the future, I teach”.

Great leaders are teachers! They do touch the future.

What greater contribution can you make to those who work for you than to help mold successful futures!

***** S&E *****

Humming Along

This is a different kind of success, but a success nevertheless. And some distance from the intent of this page, “Success”. However, here it is…

I’m about as far from a “birder” as you can be, birder being one who studies birds. But…

A Humming Bird (HB) flew into the garage. It happens infrequently and not always HB’s. Normally I use fishing net to capture the bird and release it outside. The HB was too small so it always flew out of the holes in the netting. humming bird artr

This went on for hours, I was pissed and the HB exhausted. It eventually landed on top of a container located near the garage ceiling, resting, or in torpor as it is called. With the help of a ladder I was able to pick it off the container with my hand.

So, go to the web for instructions – put it in a small box (used a motorcycle battery box), let it rest, feed it sugar-water, and when it’s recovered turn it loose. I fed it through a straw, from 8 to 11pm, on and off, it eventually did respond, enthusiastically drinking from the straw. Very cool! I called it a night putting a bottle cap of sugar-water in the box, hoping it would be alive in the morning. They can die in four hours if not fed due to their high rate of metabolism.

At 7 am it was very much awake, sitting on the edge of the bottle cap. I placed the box in a hedge row out back, opened the lid fully and off it went.

Very interesting birds –When hummingbirds migrate to the United States in the springtime, they cover 500 miles across the Gulf of Mexico, flying for 20 hours without stopping. In preparation for migration, a hummingbird will store half its body weight worth of fat. Hummingbirds migrate alone and not in flocks. Very commonly the males migrate first followed by the females.

http://hummingbirds.ucdavis.edu/hummingbird_information/interesting_facts.cfm

***** S&E *****

Log Entry No. 121: “Hooter’s Cruiser”

Hooter spent gobs of money, time, and effort in the spring, converting a used panel van into his dream camper with many special features and accommodations. He lived in the northeast, his area famous for its nasty winters featuring cold, ice, and snow. Accompanying those elements were the many tons of road sand and salt just waiting to ruin your car or in Hooter’s case his newly restored camper.

Hooter 2 Hooter’s answer to the DOT’s concerted effort to slowly rot his dream machine was to store it away for the winter. His answer to an alternative source of transportation was an early, old 1960’s boat of a car for which he paid close to nothing, as I recall a few hundred bucks. It only had to last until spring. An honest description of the car would be to describe it as a rust bucket, featuring peeling paint, many dents, banged up wheel covers… one owner away from the junk yard, just plain ugly.

Unlike his van, he had little respect for his winter “Beater” as he called it. He used the back seat as a garbage area for all sorts of waste to include rags, empty cans, fast food garbage and empty automobile oil containers. The Beater had a never-ending, insatiable appetite for motor oil, much of which went up in black smog, a byproduct of engine operation, exiting into the atmosphere from the car’s exhaust pipe. Hooter always carried spare quarts of oil (and beer) in the back seat.

It was a chilly weekday night that turned into bar hopping ending late, maybe 1:30 am. Hooter was dropped off at his apartment by his two friends, actually relatives. They watched him ascend the outside steps to his second floor apartment. His Beater was parked just outside. After some discussion they decided the paint was so bad on the car it needed touched up, that night, before dawn, prior to 6:30 am when Hooter had to leave for work.

It was a mad rush to round-up a sufficient number of used spray paint aerosol cans to do the job. Color was not a concern.

By 2:30 am the perps were hard at work on Hooters car, skillfully applying various colors to most of the painted surfaces on the Beater. There had to be some special effects, so stars were painted on the hub caps (it was an old car, still had hub caps). The exterior mirrors were addressed, as was the roof.

Hooter 1 The trunk lid rolled down, offering a huge flat area which faced onlookers or drivers with a view of the rear of the car. So, to match the stars on the hub caps, the boys painted “State Police” across the rear of the trunk, trimming it up with two more stars on each side of State Police. Perfect!

The boys moved back a block to watch Hooter’s reaction at 6:15 am, his departure time for work.

Hooter, feeling not so good from the night before, opened his apartment door, and on the way down the steps had the pleasure of a full view of his police cruiser. The boys witnessed an indescribable dance and were sure Hooter wove a tapestry of words never featured in the English language.

I suppose the icing on the cake as it’s called, was that he had to drive his new (to him) cruiser more than 15 miles to work, much of the distance being a state highway.

It is one of those log entries that never goes away, still alive in Hooter’s family.

***** S&E *****