A Seat at the Table

At our opening retreat for Leadership Birmingham, our speaker, Sam DiPiazza, didn’t hesitate to challenge us. He spoke directly to our class with a clear charge: get out of your box. You have to learn something, grow something, and actually do something with what you encounter over the next ten months. If not, he told us, you might as well give up your seat right now—otherwise, it’s a wasted investment.

That call to action will certainly make you sit up a little straighter.

As the conversation went on, he pushed the seat analogy further, and that was where he struck a nerve—at least for me. He looked at how we lead every day: If you’re sitting around the table—for your business, your civic organization, your school—and there’s someone there who doesn’t believe your best days are ahead of you, they don’t need to have a seat at that table.

It’s a simple image, but a heavy one.

Believing our best days are ahead isn’t a matter of sticking our heads in the sand or pretending everything is hunky-dory. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Believing the best is ahead implies that there is still more learning, more growing, and more doing in front of us. It’s an admission that where we are today isn't where we aspire to be.

And yet, if someone around the table feels like we are on a downhill slope—that our true standard of excellence is in the rearview mirror—how can they genuinely contribute to building what’s next? Should they really hold a seat?

One of my favorite books has always been The Velveteen Rabbit (perhaps thanks to my own well-worn childhood stuffed animal, “Bunny”), and we loved this passage enough to have it read at our wedding:

“You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

I keep coming back to that phrase: “You become. It takes a long time.”

When we look at our organizations and who gathers around our tables, that perpetual sense of “becoming” means the learning never stops. It isn’t meant to be neatly preserved or kept safe on a shelf. It requires people who aren't afraid of the wear and tear that comes with real growth, and who keep their vision pointed forward.

We are just beginning our work in Leadership Birmingham, but this thought has stayed with me. It has me reflecting on my own seat, the people around my table, and what this simple, challenging question asks of all of us in our schools and organizations: do we believe our best days are still to come?