The Part Charlie Noticed

Charlie Stafford was a colleague of my father’s, a teacher by profession and, by most accounts, the kind who took his role seriously in a way that didn’t always make him popular but did make him memorable, which, as it turns out, may be the more important of the two.

One evening, he was walking through the Bigg Market in Newcastle, an area known less for quiet reflection and more for noise, chaos, and the sort of energy that comes from a few hundred people all drinking to excess at the same time. As Charlie and my dad walked through that crowd, a voice suddenly rang out from somewhere in the distance. “Mr. Stafford!”

Both men stopped and turned, scanning the crowd, trying to locate the source of the voice, which, given the size and density of the gathering, was no small task, and then, just as they were orienting themselves, the same voice followed up with a little more clarity and a lot more force. “You’re a bastard!”

It was not, by any conventional standard, a compliment, nor was it particularly subtle, and yet Charlie paused for a moment, took it in, and then turned to his colleague with a beaming smile saying, “You see that? He called me Mr. Stafford.”

There's a leadership lesson in that story....