The smell hit me first: rotten eggs mixed with sour orange juice, fermenting in the Carolina heat. I was waist-deep in a dumpster behind WEND 106.5 “The End,” Charlotte’s alternative rock station, fishing through garbage bags for a set of keys. I was nineteen years old, an unpaid intern, and learning something important about power and responsibility inside big organizations.
Gladys, a beloved DJ at our sister oldies station, was an oldie herself. Which means she wasn’t as observant as she used to be. She failed to notice that she bumped her keys off her desk into the trash can. This wouldn’t be a big deal, except it was trash day. And the bags were already in the dumpster. Her producer asked the associate producer to retrieve them. The associate producer nodded, and found someone under him to take on the task. The request traveled down the organizational chart until it landed with me, the lowest person in the company.
So I walked out to the parking lot, climbed up the corrugated steel walls, took a huge breath, and lowered myself into the dumpster.
The stench was biblical. Fast food wrappers, greasy chicken bones from Bojangles, everything festering in that metal box. I have a terrible sense of smell and this smell still haunts me.
I navigated the trash like a surgeon, careful not to touch more than I had to, until I spied the keys. Gladys was grateful. Not effusive, but polite enough. This was exactly the kind of work unpaid interns do. Shit flows downhill, after all.
It makes sense that Gladys asked for help. What bothered me is that it took six people before it got to someone who would. It was that everyone else refused.
I went on to have a number of different jobs at all kinds of places. And I got to see how people thought about leadership. When some people transitioned into management, they became allergic to being in the trenches. So many work tasks were now beneath them. I had other bosses who regularly ate shit to spare their charges having to do unpleasant work. Those leaders inspired the hell out of me. Turns out the title is not what makes you a leader. It’s whether or not you can still do the dirty work.
Ten years later, I became CEO of an organization overseeing hundreds of teams running startup events across 50 countries. Hosting events means buying tons of pizza and Red Bulls, which means a lot of trash. As CEO, I loved taking out the trash. It gave me an opportunity to model the behavior I wanted to see from my teams. When they saw me throwing away pizza boxes or sweeping floors, they knew the leader wasn’t above that kind of work. Which made them that much more bought into our mission.
Good leadership is being willing to climb into the dumpster when the keys are lost. Not because you’re at the bottom of the ladder, but because the work needs doing and you’re not above it.
Thanks to readers of early drafts: Matthew Beebe, Rik Van Den Berge