The Campbell Academy Blog (111)

The chair

I got a new chair for my office earlier this year (that went with my new desk).

It's brown; Marie chose it, she has much more taste than me.

It looks lovely, but it's still my chair, even though it replaced my old chair, which was black, which is now in my shed at the back where I work from home.

It's not really my chair, though; it's the chair for the person who sits in that office and does the work that is required to be the person that sits in that office.

It might not always be my chair; someone else might sit there in the future.

You can sit in that chair if you want, it's totally fine, but to sit in the chair, you have to accept a certain degree of responsibility that goes with sitting in that chair.

My job is an enormous privilege, and it brings me and my family enormous privilege too.

It comes, though, with a degree of responsibility, decision-making, and action-taking that only some people understand, even the people within the organisation themselves.

As I get older and go further and climb higher up whatever ladder I'm climbing, more and more people are happy to come and give me a small piece of advice or instruction or suggest a pathway I should take.

One of the jobs of sitting in the chair is to take all of that information into the round and then make the right decision based on the values, direction, ethics, and benefit for everyone in the maximum possible way.

If you don't have the vision or the view of the whole organisation, it's sometimes hard for other people to decide why you've made your choice.

This is the price of leadership.

You are often seen as being the bad guy or often seen as someone who's taken a decision that doesn't seem to make any sense, or people don't understand.

Everybody who works in the organisation is nice; therefore, nobody who works in the organisation should be disadvantaged, but that's not in any way a circle that you can possibly square.

Benefiting one person is often to disadvantage another, and making the decision to decide which of those is, which is one of the main jobs of sitting in that chair.
I remember my brother used to say, "When you're big enough" I guess that's how it works for sitting in the chair.

If you want to give advice and you want your advice to be taken 100% of the time, then maybe you should be the one sitting in the chair.