Lessons Learned: September 11th

As hard as it is to believe, today is the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001.

While TV, print and digital media have recently bombarded us with stories of that fateful day, I’ve done my best to avoid their coverage. Instead, I’ve spent some moments on my own thinking about my experiences of that day. It’s the usual stuff-where I was, how I heard and how I reacted when the news reached me. I’ve also thought about how much the world has changed in ten short years. How much I’ve changed.

Ten years ago today I was working in Halifax, Nova Scotia as a regional manager for a car rental company. My wife was about three months pregnant with our first child and my thoughts were split between overwhelming joy and secret terror at the prospects of being a dad.

I had chosen to spend my day at our largest and busiest branch. The day was like any other-customers and employees coming and going constantly, phones ringing off the hook. In a word, it was crazy.

Our branches didn’t have televisions or internet or radios. Cell phones didn’t send automatic updates on catastrophic world events like the one we were about to live through. Instead, while our employees were out picking up customers, they heard on car radios that a plane had crashed into a tower and brought the news back to the office. Our customers too were hearing the news and sharing it with us each time they arrived.

Sometime after the initial reports, someone said they had heard a plane had just crashed into a tower. We assumed they were telling us what we had known for a while, but then the awful realization set in that this wasn’t old news. There were two planes. Planes crashed in other parts of the US and we learned that these were coordinated terrorist attacks. Towers collapsed. We were in the middle of an earth shattering series of events that none of us would ever forget.

At the time, I thought myself a good manager. I thought my role was to acknowledge the horrible events that had overtaken the day, but keep the team focused on running the business. I was aware that this was going to be more difficult than any challenge we had faced before as a team, but somehow we had to quickly put it out of our minds and do what we did on any other day.

My wife was frantically calling me on my cell phone with every update as she sat glued to our TV set at home. Like anyone else, my mind was racing, but I thought that if I showed even the slightest hint of emotion that our business would implode. So, I did my best to put it out of my mind and asked the team to focus on doing their jobs. I could tell I wasn’t giving my people what they wanted that day, but I believed that good leadership could make you extremely unpopular at times.

Looking back, I don’t think it was wrong of me to try to balance out the delirium in the office by remaining calm and asking that others did the same. But, it’s clear to me now that I expected others to manage their shock and their pain exactly as I did, by putting it out of their mind and focus only on the business. That wasn’t fair of me under the circumstances and I’ve regretted it ever since.

I wish I had put less emphasis on the business and more on the people I managed. I wish I had given them an opportunity to react in whatever way they felt necessary before asking them to carry on with the business of renting cars.

I wish I realized then that the business of renting cars should never be made to seem more important than the emotions of those employees who faithfully ran the business every single day, especially in a crisis such as this.

I realize that now.

I shared these thoughts with my wife earlier tonight and she asked me if I feel differently about the way I acted that day because I’m a dad or simply because I’m older. I thought about the question for a minute, then answered that fatherhood has given me more patience and compassion. Then, I added that being older has shown me that there are a lot more important things in life than running a business or being someone’s boss.

I can’t say September 11th is solely responsible for these lessons, but I know that it played a part.