There was an old movie quote “Jesus came to serve man, but not to be man’s servant.” What I think that means and this post means is the leader is the one who sets the pace, tone and agenda for the daily runnings and the big picture. I don’t think a cockroach problem was an “appointment.” I think if Tony had a busy day and the lady came into his office screaming and there was an actual legitimate problem, he probably would’ve set his other “appointments” aside. But the point is not every problem people have is “major.” She had a problem with a petty cockroach and felt it was someone else’s job (the head guy of 150 people) to kill it. Probably not the wisest use of his time or the company’s.

How does this principle of not “killing cockroaches” for any screaming lady line up with Jesus’ washing the feet of His disciples or giving the “bread to dogs”?

Can’t interruptions actually become appointments?

Thanks!

When I was a child I had a phobia of spiders and insects, especially cockroaches. We lived in Florida and South America, so this was not good. At some point, though, I worked out that the thing I was MOST afraid of was cockroaches, which were horrible and disgusting. So I would say to myself of every other insect: Well, it’s not a cockroach. So I stopped being terrified of crickets, beetles and so on because they weren’t cockroaches. I went to England to study classics at Oxford; someone told me all spiders in England were harmless. So when I found a large spider in the bath I would tell myself: Look. A, it’s not a cockroach, and B, it’s harmless. So I would pick it up and take it outside. Once you have picked up a large spider and held it in your hands you stop being nervous around spiders. The result was that I not only stopped being afraid of non-poisonous spiders, I also stopped being nervous around poisonous spiders, and, for that matter, bees and wasps.

I later moved to Chesterfield, where I had a garden infested with slugs. I had previously thought of slugs as repulsive; one day I discovered that slugs, like snails, have eyes on stalks. If a slug thinks something interesting is going on, it will put up the stalks so it can have a look around; if it’s nervous it will retract the stalks. I thought this was very endearing; I could not bring myself to kill these creatures, so I got in the habit of picking them off plants and tossing them over the wall into the wilderness below.

This left the cockroach as the Thing of Horror. A couple of years ago I read an article somewhere on the feeding preferences of Oriental cockroaches: they like sweet sticky buns. All cockroaches like beer. I found this too rather endearing, and I could not feel the revulsion for cockroaches that I had had all my life.

A CEO probably does have better things to do than kill cockroaches. Part of leadership, though, is not simply confronting one’s own fears, but teaching other people how to do so. So one could redefine the task: the subordinate sees the task as getting the cockroach killed, but the leader sees the task as learning to face fear.